Monday, October 05, 2009

Cruel and Unusual Punishment

Here is a blog post from Doug Berman at Sentencing Law and Policy reporting that the Iowa Supreme Court had questions under its state constitution about the legality of a 25 year sentence for statutory rape and remanded for findings as applied to that defendant. I thought this was a useful reminder in a sentencing landscape that is varying day by day. Although we have raised a lot of facial challenges to certain sentences in Jessica's Laws cases, don't forget about as applied challenges as well. It may be the only thing you can argue in a case where a sentence is otherwise set by statute.

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