be the duty of the courts to adjudge such penalties to be within the constitutional prohibition." But electrocution was not in that category. In Trop v. Dulles, the Court held (5-4) that it was cruel and unusual to deprive a native-born citizen of his U.S. citizenship by reason of his conviction by court-martial for wartime desertion. The Court recognized that the death penalty would have been permissible, yet it said, "But it is equally plain that the existence of the death penalty is not a license to the Government to devise any punishment short of death within the limit of its imagination." The Court held that making Trop stateless was a cruel and unusual punishment because: "The punishment strips the citizen of his status in the national and international political community. His very existence is at the sufferance of the country in which he happens to find himself." The last in this line of cases before Robinson was Francis v. Resweber. In Francis, the Court considered whether Louisiana could try a second time to electrocute a convicted murderer, after the first attempt failed because of a defect in the State's electric chair. The Court held, 5-4, that re-electrocuting the defendant Francis was not cruel and unusual. 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). The Court quoted obiter dicta by Justice Field in dissent in O'Neil v. Vermont, 144 U.S. 323 (1892): "the inhibition was directed not only against punishments which inflict torture, 'but against all punishments which, by their excessive length or severity, are greatly disproportioned to the offenses charged.'". Justices White and Holmes dissented on the grounds that the Eighth Amendment did not prohibit excessive or disproportionate penalties. Weems may have been the earliest "disproportionality" Eighth Amendment holding. Supreme Court ruling in Robinson A fragmented Court reversed the state's judgment. The main opinion, by Justice Potter Stewart (joined by Justices Warren, Black and Brennan) in combination with Douglas's concurring opinion, recognized that drug addiction is a disease, and that it is unconstitutional to impose punishment for having a disease. Justice Stewart wrote that even "one day in prison for the 'crime' of having a