The governor of the state of Tennessee, in the United States, signed a law that provides for the death penalty for criminals convicted of raping minors. The law will take effect on July 1, but cannot be enforced by the state due to a 2008 Supreme Court ruling.
The text promulgated by Republican Bill Lee provides that the crimes of rape and aggravated rape of minors must be punished by the death penalty, life imprisonment without the possibility of parole or life imprisonment.
Even without enforcement power, state lawmakers hope the law will pressure the Supreme Court, with a conservative majority, to review the ban on the death penalty for rape crimes.
The US Supreme Court ruled in 2008 that those convicted of child rape cannot be executed, concluding that the death penalty for crimes against individuals can only be applied to murderers.
The ruling stemmed from the case of Patrick Kennedy, who appealed the 2003 death sentence he received in the state of Louisiana after being convicted of raping his 8-year-old stepdaughter.
At the time, then-Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote that execution in this case would violate the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment, citing “evolving standards of decency” in the United States. Such standards, the judge ruled, prohibit capital punishment for any crime against an individual other than murder.
“We conclude that, in determining whether the death penalty is excessive, there is a distinction between first-degree intentional homicide, on the one hand, and non-homicidal crimes against individual persons, including child rape, on the other,” Kennedy wrote.
This is not the first time that an American state has questioned the Supreme Court’s decision. In 2023, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis also signed into law a law that made child rapists eligible for the death penalty, with the minimum sentence being life in prison without parole.
“We believe that in the worst-case scenario, the only appropriate punishment is ultimate punishment, and therefore this bill establishes a procedure to be able to challenge that precedent,” the Republican governor said at a news conference at the time.
Source: CNN Brasil
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