Through his opinion in "Harmelin", Justice Scalia voiced his disagreement with the Court's decision in "Solem v. Helm", , which was decided before he was appointed to the Court. He first identified the English Bill of Rights of 1689 as the source of the Eighth Amendment's ban on cruel and unusual punishment. According to Scalia, "Solem" assumed that the Americans who adopted the Eighth Amendment in 1791 understood that language in the same way as the English of 1689. Scalia disputed this hypothesis. He pointed to a dispute among historians about which royal abuses the Declaration was intended to combat. Some historians contend that these abuses were the harsh punishments for treason—drawing and quartering, beheading, disemboweling—meted out by the Bloody Assizes. Other historians contend that the Declaration was meant to rein in the enormously arbitrary sentencing power the king had exercised in sentencing a notorious perjurer. Regardless, Scalia argued that those who wrote the Declaration considered a punishment to be "cruel and unusual" only if it were outside of the judge's power to impose. The phrase "'cruel and unusual' is treated as interchangeable with 'cruel and illegal.'" For this reason, the English of the 17th century did not believe a "cruel and unusual" punishment was a disproportionate one.