The American Law Institute (ALI), one of the most respected institutions in American jurisprudence, recently got rid of the capital punishment section from its Model Penal Code.
If that sounds dry to you, consider this: the Model Penal Code serves as a blueprint for state laws. Their capital punishment section was the framework on which every state’s modern death penalty law was based. So the decision to scrap that section altogether is pretty momentous. After a comprehensive study, the ALI simply realized that the death penalty system was too broken to fix.
And when the vanguard of the legal establishment thinks the death penalty deserves to be dropped, lawmakers sit up and listen.
Testimony on the ALI decision during recent hearings in Kansas elicited “rapt attention,” according to Donna Schneweis, Coordinator of the Kansas Coalition Against the Death Penalty (KCADP):
“Sometimes you see people on their laptops or shuffling papers but not here. There were enough lawyers on the committee that they recognized the significance of the ALI’s move.”
