Kennedy v. Louisiana, 554 U.S. 407 (2008), was a landmark decision by the Supreme Court of the United States that held that the Eighth Amendment's Cruel and Unusual Punishment Clause did not permit a state to punish the crime of rape of a child with the death penalty; more broadly, the power of the state to impose the death penalty against an individual for committing a crime that did not result in the death of the victim is now limited to crimes against the state (i.e., espionage, treason).
Read more about Kennedy V. Louisiana: Background, U.S. Supreme Court, Questions Presented, Reaction
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“Where there is no vision, the people perish.”
—Bible: Hebrew Proverbs, 29:18.
President John F. Kennedy quoted this passage on the eve of his assassination in Dallas, Texas; recorded in Theodore C. Sorenson’s biography, Kennedy, Epilogue (1965)
“I saw in Louisiana a live-oak growing,
All alone stood it and the moss hung down from the branches,
Without any companion it grew there uttering joyous leaves of dark
green,
And its look, rude, unbending, lusty, made me think of myself,
But I wonder’d how it could utter joyous leaves standing alone
there without its friend near, for I knew I could not,”
—Walt Whitman (1819–1892)