I had never heard of the American Law Institute. Perhaps you are a lawyer and you have. Perhaps you are more schooled in the intricacies of death penalty law and you have.
But as far as I can tell, this is good news. Apparently, the American Law Institute was a group of lawyers and judges who had spent quite some time coming up with legal justifications and guidelines that aimed to make the death penalty palatable. For instance, they created suggestions for the sorts of crimes and criminals to which it should be applied, in the hopes of making it less racist and arbitrary.
And now they have given up. The group has officially pronounced that the American death penalty system is broken beyond fixing, that it will never be consistent enough to be constitutional and just.
Apparently, this group was the "only intellectually respectable support" the death penalty had. And now they're done. This will change things. Hallelujah.
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1 comment:
Seems to me a lot of the support for capital punishment has eroded in the face of the work of the innocence project. Who would think that a group of students could effect such change?
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