ding determination as to their
deportability, aliens who are members of the Communist Party of the
United States, is not unconstitutional.[6]

Excessive Fines

The Supreme Court has had little to say with reference to excessive
fines or bail. In an early case it held that it had no appellate
jurisdiction to revise the sentence of an inferior court, even though
the excessiveness of the fine was apparent on the face of the record.[7]
In a dissenting opinion in United States ex rel. Milwaukee Publishing
Co. _v._ Burleson,[8] Justice Brandeis intimated that the additional
mailing costs incurred by a newspaper to which the second-class mailing
privilege had been denied constituted, in effect, a fine for a past
offense which, since it was made to grow indefinitely each day, was an
unusual punishment interdicted by the Constitution.[9]

Cruel and Unusual Punishments

The ban against "cruel and unusual punishment" has received somewhat
greater attention. In Wilkerson _v._ Utah[10] the Court observed that:
"Difficulty would attend the effort to define with exactness the extent
of the constitutional provision which provides that cruel and unusual
punishments shall not be inflicted, but it is safe to affirm that
punishments of torture, ... and all others in the same line of
unnecessary cruelty, are forbidden by that Amendment to the
Constitution."[11] Shooting as a mode of executing the death penalty was
sustained over the objection that it was cruel and unusual.

A partially successful effort has been made to enlarge the concept of
unusual punishment to cover penalties which shock the sense of justice
by their absolute or relative severity. Justice Field pointed the way
for this development in his dissenting opinion in O'Neil _v._
Vermont,[12] wherein the majority refused to apply the Eighth Amendment
to a State. With the concurrence of two other Justices he wrote that the
amendment was directed "against all punishments which by their excessive
length or severity are greatly disproportioned to the offenses
charged."[13] Eighteen years later a divided Court condemned a
Philippine statute prescribing fine and imprisonment of from twelve to
twenty years for entry of a known false statement in a public record, on
the ground that the gross disparity between this punishment and that
imposed for other more serious fines made it cruel and unusual, and as
such, repugnant to the Bill of Rights.[14] No constitutional infirmity
was