The single line statements:

eval("08")  ; and
eval("09")

both crash; while

eval("07")  works fine

They don't crash.  They raise a SyntaxError because the "08" and "09"
are invalid octal literals.

If you're working with decimal literals that are padded on the left with
zeroes, those need to be stripped off before conversion:

   '000987'.lstrip('0') --> '987'

Or, you can use the int() function:

   int('000987')

The leading zero is used to define octal numbers, 8 and 9 are not valid
octal digits, see
http://docs.python.org/reference/lexical_analysis.html#integer-and-long-integer-literals

Also, you don't need to use eval to reproduce that behavior.

The number displayed is the decimal equivalent:
>>> 07
7
>>> 010
8