Revisiting the Constitution: Clarify What's Cruel and Unusual Punishment
 As I have suggested elsewhere, clarifying and expanding the Eight Amendment could help. It should specifically state that excessive terms of incarceration are prohibited, just as it bans excessive fines. It should expressly prohibit mandatory sentences so that every case gets the benefit of individualized attention by a judge. And it should insist that legislatures create a record showing that they considered empirical evidence about the law's likely impact.
 The eight amendment should be revised and further detailed. Long sentencing should be banned and further shortened. There should be no mandatory laws so each case can be given the opportunity to be exhaustive. She states how this is contradicting to the Eight Amendment Bill of Rights.
 I chose this quote because i agree with Barkow. I think that imprisonment for certain cases should not be excessive. Each case is different and many which are overlooked and proven to be judged incorrectly. I also think that depending on the crime committed a sentence should be shorter and a second chance should be given with in a shorter time frame.

The constitution and federalist

The second article deals with the executive branch of government headed by the president of the United States. This article explains the controversial electoral college, an institution that was set up to prevent presidential elections from being decided directly by the people. Instead votes are allocated based upon a number of "electoral votes" possessed by the individual states not by the  people of the states. So when we count the results of the election we count the states the president won, not the people who voted for the president. This system tends to benefit the less popular candidate: some elections that were very close in terms of popular vote seemed like huge victories in terms of electoral votes, some have even lost the popular vote and still won int the electoral college like George Bush in 2000 ( even counting Florida, Bush still lost the popular vote, however the results of that election are too distorted to use this as a good example of "winning" the electoral college while losing the popular vote).                                                                                                                                      The second article consists of the executive branch of government. The second article was set up so that the votes are not directly by the people, but instead by state. Votes are based on electoral votes by state not by each individual. This may sometimes help the less popular candidate because the votes are not based on population. Some states have larger populations than others so while you may have the majority of votes in one state you may not have the majority in other ( small states) which will lower your chances of getting elected.                                                                                                             I chose this passage because I was not familiar with the voting system. I asked many people I knew if they would vote and their response was " no, my vote doesn't count and therefore I'm not voting". In a sense I see their point of view because although your vote is somewhat used it is still not completely counted, I would say it is partially counted. I don't think that this is a fair system because every vote should count.