Harmelin v. Michigan, 501 U.S. 957 (1991), was a case decided by the Supreme Court of the United States under the Eighth Amendment to the United States Constitution. The Court ruled that the Eighth Amendment's Cruel and Unusual Punishment Clause allowed a state to impose a life sentence without the possibility of parole for the possession of of cocaine. The Court's narrow ruling left a major question of Eighth Amendment law unresolved. Since the Court's decision in Gregg v. Georgia, the Court had incorporated a detailed proportionality analysis into the cruel and unusual punishment analysis required in capital cases. The defendant Ronald Harmelin directly asked the Court to extend the reach of that analysis to noncapital cases such as his. Although five Justices agreed that Harmelin's sentence was not unconstitutionally cruel and unusual, six Justices agreed that the Cruel and Unusual Punishment Clause bore some kind of proportionality analysis. Yet among those six, three supported a proportionality principle that is highly deferential to legislative judgments, while three others supported a more searching proportionality analysis that would have struck down Michigan's mandatory life-without-parole sentence for possessing more than of cocaine (). The State of Michigan was represented by Richard Thompson and Michael Modelski. Thompson's other credits include serving as a prosecutor of Dr. Jack Kevorkian. Various state attorneys general, as well as the United States Solicitor General, filed amicus curiae briefs on behalf of the State of Michigan. The Court-appointed counsel for Harmelin, the ACLU and a group of criminal defense attorneys filed briefs in support of the defendant's position. The majority ruling The only aspect of the decision that garnered the vote of five Justices was the ultimate conclusion that the mandatory life without parole sentence required by the Michigan law forbidding the possession of more than 650 grams of cocaine was not cruel and unusual punishment. "Severe, mandatory penalties may be cruel, but they are not unusual in the constitutional sense, having been employed in various forms throughout our Nation's history." Nor did the Eighth Amendment require a sentencing court to consider mitigating factors in noncapital cases. It was enough that Michigan law allowed for executive clemency, or that the legislature might at some later date retroactively reduce the sentence for Harmelin's crime. The proportionality debate The Justices could not agree, however, whether and to what extent the Eighth Amendment imposed a proportionality requirement in noncapital sentencing proceedings. Justice