Eighth Amendment to the United States Constitution
In 1910, in Weems v. United States, the Supreme Court admitted that “what constitutes a cruel and unusual punishment has not been exactly decided.” The Supreme Court began using the "evolving standards of decency" test. In Trop v Dulles (1958) the Court agreed with the view that what are prohibited "cruel and unusual punishments" should change over time based on punishments that offend society's "evolving sense of decency." Very recently the courts have been reluctant to keep the term "unusual" in their judicial interpretations.