The police arrested him under California law making it a misdemeanor to "be addicted to the use of narcotics"; Robinson was convicted in the Municipal Court of Los Angeles, and sentenced to 90 days' imprisonment.

[2] For example: However, in Weems v. United States, 217 U.S. 349 (1910), in which a punishment of twelve years in irons at hard and painful labor was imposed for the crime of falsifying public records, the Court held that the penalty was cruel in its excessiveness and unusual in its character (i.e., its disproportionality).

Second, "even if interpreted as penal, the sanction of incarceration for 3 to 12 months is not unreasonable when applied to a person who has voluntarily placed himself in a condition posing a serious threat to the State.

He argued, first, that "on this record, it was within the power of the State of California to confine him by criminal proceedings for the use of narcotics or for regular use amounting to habitual use.

I fail to see why the Court deems it more appropriate to write into the Constitution its own abstract notions of how best to handle the narcotics problem, for it obviously cannot match either the States or Congress in expert understanding.

The California Attorney General's office discovered this fact upon remand and notified the Court, since this arguably mooted the case long before its decision.

In City of Grants Pass v. Johnson, the court declined to extend the argument in Robinson to laws prohibiting even homeless people from sleeping in public.

[21] In Rummel v. Estelle, the Court held that it did not constitute cruel and unusual punishment to impose a life sentence, under a recidivist statute, upon a defendant who had been convicted, successively, of fraudulent use of a credit card to obtain $80 worth of goods or services, passing a forged check in the amount of $28.36, and obtaining $120.75 by false pretenses.

"[22] Despite its unwillingness to find unconstitutional disproportionality, the Court conceded, "This is not to say that a proportionality principle would not come into play in the extreme example mentioned by the dissent, .

"[23] In Solem v. Helm, a 5-4 majority set a conviction aside under the Eighth Amendment, because it was disproportionate—a sentence of life imprisonment without possibility of parole, imposed under a recidivist statute for successive offenses that included three convictions of third-degree burglary, one of obtaining money by false pretenses, one of grand larceny, one of third-offense driving while intoxicated, and one of writing a "no account" check with intent to defraud.

"[26] The judgment of the Court was that life imprisonment without parole for the crime of possession of more than 650 grams of cocaine did not violate the Eighth Amendment.

It is not some latent or passive proclivity; it is an active state, voluntarily induced and laden with a present capacity for further injury to society.