Group Gives Up Death Penalty Work in Frustration

New York Times ^ | January 4, 2010 | Adam Liptak

[reaganaut1]

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number of death sentences continued to fall, Ohio switched to a single chemical for lethal injections and New Mexico repealed its death penalty entirely.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.”

[reaganaut1]

The arrogance! The elites believe that everything must be justified on their terms and using their assumptions.

The death penalty deters, it encourages guilty defendants to plea bargain, and it is sometimes the only punishment that fits the crime. That's my "intellectual framework".

[Star Traveler]

“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.”

If that's the case, then it's not such good news for them to simply "disappear" on the issue...

[chesley]

Intellectualism. Or sophistry?

[Tex-Con-Man]

Shheeesh...talk about a disconnect.

These legal intellectuals are all having conversations with each other, and believe they have reached an enlightened consensus that the death penalty is legally unsupportable.

And yet, read a message board (of any political persuasion) that posts another story about a guy who rapes and murders a nine year old girl, and the support for the death penalty for the crime is almost always unanimous...even from people who are philosophically opposed to it.

The death penalty exists for a very good reason, and will live a long a healthy life.

[Trod Upon]

I prefer seeing the death penalty imposed and carried out by the would-be victim. Arm the populace and forget about court action!