51�Թ�

This is a lesson that death penalty opponents need to keep in mind before they endorse any execution method or say that it meets the requirements of the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment.

“While firing squads may shock the senses,” Moran observed, “they are in fact the only way to comport with the requirements of the Eighth Amendment.”

“For example, if Trump decides to deport a citizen to the El Salvador prison, as he has suggested he could do and would do under his broad foreign affairs power, and even though the citizen is protected by the Constitution from cruel and unusual punishment under the Eighth Amendment," Gersham said, "how is that right enforced?”

That alone should mean that shipping people there runs afoul of domestic laws and potentially the Eighth Amendment, if indeed the U.S. can be legally considered the jailer.

If the death penalty serves neither retributive nor deterrent purposes, then it amounts to the purposeless infliction of pain, the very definition of cruelty prohibited by the Eighth Amendment.