Cruel and unusual punishment might not be in the spotlight every day at ASU, but it was all the rage on Constitution Day.

Robert McWhirter of the Maricopa County Legal Defenders’ Office presented a history of the Eighth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution to a group of about eight people on Wednesday in Hayden Library.

His lecture, titled “Baby Don’t Be Cruel: What’s so ‘Cruel and Unusual’ About the Eighth Amendment?” focused on the interpretation of the amendment through history.

“The Framers’ original intent was we would be better than they were,” McWhirter said. But beyond that, he said, they may not have put much consideration into the amendment.

“What means ‘cruel’ is totally subjective,” he said. “Words evolve; they have different meanings.”

He said the meaning of punishment has changed as well. Punishment by law has historically been about deterrence, incapacitation or rehabilitation, but now it is about retribution, he said.

“We’ve left behind the rehabilitative model,” he said. Now we focus on making those convicted of crimes pay for their social injustices, he said.

“Even punishments we know to be cruel were [historically] not about retribution,” he said. “It’s about public shame.”

Public whippings or burnings at the stake were used to humiliate the convicted and deter others from committing similar crimes, but they were not meant to make people pay for their crimes, he said.

“The Eighth Amendment, though, was not about the method of punishment,” he said. While the Founding Fathers may not have known exactly what “cruel and unusual punishment” meant, they intended punishment to be proportional to the crime committed, he said.

McWhirter’s lecture was part of a series that covers each amendment in the Constitution. He also delivered his lecture on the Sixth Amendment, “How the Constitution Guarantees You a Trial, a Lawyer and a Chamber Pot!”

The Undergraduate Student Government also hosted events on campus for Constitution Day. USG registered students to vote on Hayden Lawn all afternoon Wednesday. Students had the opportunity to take pictures with cardboard cutouts of presidential candidates Barack Obama and John McCain.

ASU professor TJ Davis also spoke to students in a lecture titled, “Slavery, Torture and the U.S. Constitution,” and USG held a meeting to kick off its voter registration program.

Reach the reporter at adam.sneed@asu.edu.