‘Death Penalty’ Dead Law Walking?

American Law Institute, 'only intellectually respectable support' for capital punishment system in U.S. abandons support for it...

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A bit of good-ish, encouraging news from out of an otherwise horrible year, from this week’s New York Times

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number of death sentences continued to fall, Ohio switched to a single chemical for lethal injections and New Mexico repealed its death penalty entirely.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

“It’s very bad news for the continued legitimacy of the death penalty,” Professor Zimring said.

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Reader Comments on

‘Death Penalty’ Dead Law Walking?

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3 Responses

  1. 1)
    BlueHawk said on 1/6/2010 @ 5:57pm PT: [Permalink]

    Did someone open a can of spam here ?

    [ed note: Patience. Patience. I never fail to open a can of whuppass on spammers. 😛 —99]

  2. 2)
    BlueHawk said on 1/6/2010 @ 6:16pm PT: [Permalink]

    The death penalty…

    What a practice for an enlightened so called Christian nation…

    Well maybe not so enlightened…and the Christian thing isn’t panning out well for the country either…

    I’ll revise…

    The death penalty…the perfect metaphor for America….

  3. 3)
    Joyce McCloy said on 1/6/2010 @ 9:46pm PT: [Permalink]

    All lawmakers and policy makers should be required to read “Ultimate Punishment” by author, attorney, former prosecutor Scott Turow.

    I read it. From Wikipedia:

    Turow bases his opinions on his experiences as a prosecutor and, in his post-prosecutorial years, working on behalf of death-row inmates, as well as his two years on Illinois’s Commission on Capital Punishment, charged by the former Gov. George Ryan.

    Turow presents both sides of the death penalty debate and seems himself to flip sides depending on the argument.

    Turow’s reflections include:

    Thoughts on victims’ rights vs. community rights
    Whether execution is a deterrent
    The possible execution of an innocent person
    If not the death penalty, what to do with the worst offenders

    There have been several death penalties overturned in my home state. The justice system is not fair, so we have to decide – do we risk putting some innocent people to death or not?

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