In United States Law, the United States Supreme Court proposed the Proportionality Doctrine in three cases during the 1980s, namely Enmund v. Florida(1982), Solem v. Helm (1983) and Tison v. Arizona (1987), to clarify this key principle of proportionality within the Cruel and Unusual Punishment Clause of the Eighth Amendment. The fundamental principle behind proportionality is that the punishment should fit the crime. In 1983, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that courts must do three things to decide whether a sentence is proportional to a specific crime:[9]
- Compare the nature and gravity of the offense and the harshness of the penalty,
- Compare the sentences imposed on other criminals in the same jurisdiction; i.e., whether more serious crimes are subject to the same penalty or to less serious penalties, and
- Compare the sentences imposed for commission of the same crime in other jurisdictions.
Proportionality is also present in other areas of municipal law in the United States, such as civil procedure. For example, it is embodied in Fed.R.Civ.P. 26(b)(2)(C), which considers whether the burden or expense of the proposed discovery outweighs its likely benefit.[10] Proportionality is a key consideration in the discovery process, and has been applied to e-discovery, where it has been attributed with significant cost-savings.[11] It is likely that proportionality will be applied to new and developing areas of law, such as the law of legal technology.
