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Rh number of crimes punishable by death. See Act of Apr. 30, 1790, 1 Stat. 112. Of course, that doesn’t mean the American people must continue to use the death penalty. The same Constitution that permits States to authorize capital punishment also allows them to outlaw it. But it does mean that the judiciary bears no license to end a debate reserved for the people and their representatives.

While the Eighth Amendment doesn’t forbid capital punishment, it does speak to how States may carry out that punishment, prohibiting methods that are “cruel and unusual.” What does this term mean? At the time of the framing, English law still formally tolerated certain punishments even though they had largely fallen into disuse—punishments in which “terror, pain, or disgrace [were] superadded” to the penalty of death. 4 W. Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England 370 (1769). These included such “[d]isgusting” practices as dragging the prisoner to the place of execution, disemboweling, quartering, public dissection, and burning alive, all of which Blackstone observed “savor[ed] of torture or cruelty.” Ibid.

Methods of execution like these readily qualified as “cruel and unusual,” as a reader at the time of the Eighth Amendment’s adoption would have understood those words. They were undoubtedly “cruel,” a term often defined to mean “[p]leased with hurting others; inhuman; hard-hearted; void of pity; wanting compassion; savage; barbarous; unrelenting,” 1 S. Johnson, A Dictionary of the English Language (4th ed. 1773), or “[d]isposed to give pain to others, in body or mind; willing or pleased to torment, vex or afflict; inhuman; destitute of pity, compassion or kindness,” 1 N. Webster, An American Dictionary of the English Language (1828). And by the time of the founding, these methods had long fallen out of use and so had become “unusual.” 4 Blackstone, supra, at 370; Banner 76; Baze, 553 U. S., at 97 (, concurring in judgment); see also Stinneford, The Original Meaning of