Support for death penalty dealt a devastating blow

Yet more evidence that the maintenance of capital punishment is an untenable position has emerged via the New York Times. 

Adam Liptak wrote on Monday that The American Law Institute -- a group of lawyers and legal professionals which in 1926 created the modern framework for the death penalty as part of the Modern Penal Code -- announced that it was officially jettisoning support for, and work on, the death penalty. According to Liptak this represents “a tectonic shift in legal theory.”

Their decision follows an extensive report on the capital punishment system by the ALI in April 2009 which concluded that maintaining the death penalty would inevitably result in systemic failures, miscarriages of justice, spiralling costs and racial disparities to name but a few of the problems.

By abandoning its major project on the death penalty the ALI has acknowledged what opponents of this barbaric practice have always argued: any theoretical or intellectual legitimacy of the capital punishment system is a fallacy.

One hugely important consequence is that from September 2010 first year criminal law students in the USA will all learn that such an influential group of 4,000 judges, lawyers and legal professors have, as Professor Gross of the University of Michigan says, “all concluded that the death penalty in the United States is a moral and practical failure.” Hopefully such a sea-change in the education of future US lawyers will further undermine the viability of capital punishment.