Powell v. Texas - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

Powell v. Texas, 392 U.S. 514

Case citation

Case citation is the system used in many countries to identify the decisions in past court cases, either in special series of books called reporters or law reports, or in a 'neutral' form which will identify a decision wherever it was reported...

(1968), was a United States Supreme Court case which ruled that a Texas statute criminalizing public intoxication

Public intoxication

Public intoxication, also known as "drunk and disorderly", is a summary offense in many countries rated to public cases or displays of drunkenness...

did not violate the Eighth Amendment

Eighth Amendment to the United States Constitution

The Eighth Amendment to the United States Constitution is the part of the United States Bill of Rights which prohibits the federal government from imposing excessive bail, excessive fines or cruel and unusual punishments. The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that this amendment's Cruel and Unusual...

protection against cruel and unusual punishment

Cruel and unusual punishment

Cruel and unusual punishment is a phrase describing criminal punishment which is considered unacceptable due to the suffering or humiliation it inflicts on the condemned person...

. It was a 5-4 decision, and the majority opinion was by Justice Thurgood Marshall

Thurgood Marshall

Thurgood Marshall was an Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court, serving from October 1967 until October 1991...

. Justice Hugo Black

Hugo Black

Hugo Lafayette Black was an American politician and jurist. A member of the Democratic Party, Black represented Alabama in the United States Senate from 1927 to 1937, and served as an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States from 1937 to 1971. Black was nominated to the Supreme...

and Byron White

Byron White

Byron Raymond "Whizzer" White won fame both as a football halfback and as an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. Appointed to the court by President John F. Kennedy in 1962, he served until his retirement in 1993...

each wrote separate concurring opinions, and Justice Abe Fortas

Abe Fortas

Abraham Fortas was a U.S. Supreme Court associate justice from 1965 to 1969. Originally from Tennessee, Fortas became a law professor at Yale, and subsequently advised the Securities and Exchange Commission. He then worked at the Interior Department under Franklin D...

dissented.

The court's majority concluded that, Powell, the defendant who was convicted of public intoxication, "was convicted, not for being a chronic alcoholic, but for being in public while drunk on a particular occasion." Therefore, the Texas statute was not criminalizing the condition of alcoholism

Alcoholism

Alcoholism is a broad term for problems with alcohol, and is generally used to mean compulsive and uncontrolled consumption of alcoholic beverages, usually to the detriment of the drinker's health, personal relationships, and social standing...

alone, but instead punishing the defendant for his public behavior. The majority distinguished the case from the earlier case Robinson v. California
Robinson v. California
Robinson v. California, 370 U.S. 660 , was a case in which the Supreme Court of the United States held that the use of civil imprisonment as punishment solely for the misdemeanor crime of addiction to a controlled substance was a violation of the Eighth Amendment's protection against cruel and...

, which ruled that drug addiction alone as a disease could not be criminalized.

See also