There are about 3,300 people in this country who are on death row right now. But Patrick Kennedy is different from the others: both he and the state of Louisiana agree that he didn’t kill anyone. Instead, Patrick Kennedy is on death row because he was convicted of raping his 8-year-old stepdaughter. Now, after the Louisiana Supreme Court upheld his death sentence in a lengthy opinion, he has made a plea to the U.S. Supreme Court to hear his case and find his sentence unconstitutionally cruel and unusual under the Eighth Amendment. Kennedy argues in his petition for certiorari that such a punishment for child rape is “not only cruel and unusual,” but is something even worse: “cruel and unique”….

…According to Kennedy, who is represented by Jeffrey Fisher of the Stanford Law School Supreme Court Litigation Clinic, Louisiana’s statute conflicts directly with the Supreme Court’s 30-year-old holding in Coker v. Georgia that “a sentence of death is grossly disproportionate and excessive punishment for the crime of rape.”