Group That Shaped Death Penalty Gives Up On Its Own Work

[Hissyspit]

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/05/us/05bar.html

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Group Gives Up Death Penalty Work

By ADAM LIPTAK
Published: January 4, 2010
WASHINGTON

Last fall, the American Law Institute, which created the intellectual framework for the modern capital justice system almost 50 years ago, pronounced its project a failure and walked away from it.

There were other important death penalty developments last year: the number of death sentences continued to fall, Ohio switched to a single chemical for lethal injections and New Mexico repealed its death penalty entirely. But not one of them was as significant as the institute’s move, which represents a tectonic shift in legal theory.

“The A.L.I. is important on a lot of topics,” said Franklin E. Zimring, a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley. “They were absolutely singular on this topic” — capital punishment — “because they were the only intellectually respectable support for the death penalty system in the United States.”

The institute is made up of about 4,000 judges, lawyers and law professors. It synthesizes and shapes the law in restatements and model codes that provide structure and coherence in a federal legal system that might otherwise consist of 50 different approaches to everything.

In 1962, as part of the Model Penal Code, the institute created the modern framework for the death penalty, one the Supreme Court largely adopted when it reinstituted capital punishment in Gregg v. Georgia in 1976. Several justices cited the standards the institute had developed as a model to be emulated by the states.

The institute’s recent decision to abandon the field was a compromise. Some members had asked the institute to take a stand against the death penalty as such. That effort failed. Instead, the institute voted in October to disavow the structure it had created “in light of the current intractable institutional and structural obstacles to ensuring a minimally adequate system for administering capital punishment.”

That last sentence contains some pretty dense lawyer talk, but it can be untangled. What the institute was saying is that the capital justice system in the United States is irretrievably broken.

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[Batgirl]

1. k/r

Samuel Gross, a law professor at the University of Michigan, said he recalled reading Model Penal Code as a first-year law student in 1970. “The death penalty was an abstract issue of little interest to me or my fellow students,” Professor Gross said. But he remembered being impressed by the institute’s work, saying, “I thought in passing that smarter people than I had done a sensible job of figuring out this tricky problem.”

Things will look different come September, Professor Gross said.

“Law students who take first-year criminal law from 2010 on,” he said, “will learn that this same group of smart lawyers and judges — the ones whose work they read every day — has said that the death penalty in the United States is a moral and practical failure.”

[mrcheerful]

4. The problem is no one heard it. Even in DU we hear demands for the DP

for certain crimes that were horrific according to the media accounts. Liberals used to be against the justice system because of the way it is slanted against the poor and helpless, no matter what the crime was or who it was against. Anyone who has been caught up in the system knows just how slanted it is, how many posts have we seen on DU about never talking to the police without a lawyer present or how to handle being pulled over or being approached by the police on the street.

[varelse]

2. K&R

[gratuitous]

3. This is pretty astonishing

This would be like the NRA admitting that guns do indeed kill people.

[laughingliberal]

5. k & r n/t

[Solly Mack]

6. K&R

[Hissyspit]

7. .