Child Rapists Live To See Another Day
Attorney Shirley Huang, a former student of Birdsong’s, has recently had her article Child Rapists Live To See Another Day published in the American University Washington College of Law Criminal Law Brief. The Criminal Law Brief is a law journal where students, practitioners and academics may discuss, debate and explore various elements of criminal law. In her article she analyzes the Supreme Court’s decision in the 2008 case of Kennedy v. Louisiana which held that the death penalty for child rape is unconstitutional. Attorney Huang’s article grew out of very excellent research she did while a student in Birdsong’s Criminal Justice Administration Seminar. Attorney Huang won the book award in that seminar for writing the most outstanding paper of the class.
Read and Learn…
Child Rapists Live To See Another Day
Shirley Huang, Esq.[1]
I. Introduction
The human capacity for good and for compassion make the death penalty tragic; the human capacity for evil and depraved behavior make the death penalty necessary.[2]
Rape has been described as a “fate worse than death”[3] and “one of the most egregiously brutal acts one human being can inflict upon another.”[4] Child rape is perhaps the worst crime one can commit, debatably second only to murder.[5] It was not until the mid 1980s that child sexual abuse was brought to the nation’s attention by the media as a serious issue.[6]
This article explores the constitutionality of the death penalty for the crime of child rape, focusing specifically on Louisiana’s capital child rape statute.[7] In 1976, the Supreme Court decided that the death penalty for the crime of rape is a grossly disproportionate and excessive punishment, and thus violates the Eighth Amendment.[8] For over thirty years, the constitutionality of making child rape a capital crime was questioned. The Court ended the ambiguity of the issue by recently determining that the death penalty is inappropriate for the commission of child rape where the victim is left alive.[9]
