maturing society." Subsequently, the Court has looked to societal developments, as well as looking to its own independent judgment, in determining what are those "evolving standards of decency". In Kennedy v. Louisiana (2008) the Supreme Court stated: "Evolving standards of decency must embrace and express respect for the dignity of the person, and the punishment of criminals must conform to that rule." Originalists, like Justice Antonin Scalia, argue that societies may rot instead of maturing and may decrease in virtue or wisdom instead of increasing. Thus, they say, the framers wanted the amendment understood as it was written and ratified, instead of morphing as times change, and in any event legislators are more competent than judges to take the pulse of the public as to changing standards of decency. The "evolving standards" test has been subject to scholarly criticism. For example, law professor John Stinneford asserts that the "evolving standards" test misinterprets the Eighth Amendment: On the other hand, law professor Dennis Baker defends the evolving standards of decency test as advancing the moral purpose of the Eighth Amendment to ban the inflicting of unjust, oppressive, or disproportional punishments by a state on its citizens. Proportionality The Supreme Court has applied evolving standards not only to say what punishments are inherently cruel, but also to say what punishments that are not inherently cruel are nevertheless "grossly disproportionate" to the offense in question. An example can be seen in Jackson v. Bishop an Eighth Circuit decision outlawing corporal punishment in the Arkansas prison system: "The scope of the Amendment is not static...[D]isproportion, both among punishments and between punishment and crime, is a factor to be considered..." Relying on and citing its early cases O'Neil v. Vermont, and Weems v. United States the Supreme Court concluded in Enmund v. Florida that the Cruel and Unusual Punishments Clause is partly a prohibition of all punishments which, by their excessive length or severity, are greatly disproportioned to the offenses charged. Law professor John Stinneford asserts that the Eighth Amendment forbids punishments that are very disproportionate to the offense, even if the punishment by itself is not intrinsically barbaric, but he argues that "proportionality is to be measured primarily in terms of prior practice" according to the word unusual in the amendment, instead of being measured according to shifting and nebulous evolving standards. Stinneford argues that the word unusual in the Eighth Amendment has a