This article suggests that the context of the new capital child rape statutes raises serious questions about their constitutionality. Through using a social movement account, it avers to better discern how these statutes permit and encourage "arbitrariness, discrimination, caprice, and mistake." This article attempts to describe briefly how long-term social movements and short-term bursts of outrage interact with the political environment for capital child rape laws. This account attempts to lay a foundation for understanding precisely why capital child rape laws are just as constitutionally problematic as the capital rape laws in case law cited. Public reaction may provide a strong ground for declaring these statutes unconstitutional since, as the era of lynching taught, mass outrage can lead to mob violence. Enlisting the State to legitimate this outrage, when law generally calls on actors to be as dispassionate as possible, is described as perverse. The author concludes that the subjectivity and emotionalism likely to inhere in widespread application of capital child rape laws will almost certainly yield extreme arbitrariness and inadequate process for many defendants. The analysis of the multilayered political context of capital child rape laws suggests that the social forces surrounding these new legislations were inescapably too intense, too frenzied, too emotional, and too mired in racial and class-based prejudice to avoid arbitrariness and caprice. 171 notes