THE BEGINNING OF THE DEATH OF THE DEATH PENALTY

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number of death sentences continued to fall, Ohio switched to a single chemical for lethal injections and New Mexico repealed its death penalty entirely.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


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.

How many other backwards and illogical policies have they designed to be unleashed on the public?

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.”


That last sentence contains some pretty dense lawyer talk, but it can be untangled. What the institute was saying is that the capital justice system in the United States is irretrievably broken.

A study commissioned by the institute said that decades of experience had proved that the system could not reconcile the twin goals of individualized decisions about who should be executed and systemic fairness. It added that capital punishment was plagued by racial disparities; was enormously expensive even as many defense lawyers were underpaid and some were incompetent; risked executing innocent people; and was undermined by the politics that come with judicial elections.

Roger S. Clark, who teaches at the Rutgers School of Law in Camden, N.J., and was one of the leaders of the movement to have the institute condemn the death penalty outright, said he was satisfied with the compromise. “Capital punishment is going to be around for a while,” Professor Clark said. “What this does is pull the plug on the whole intellectual underpinnings for it.”

Change is slow in this country. Before we can make changes we have to change our thinking. It has been known for a long time that people with darker skin were more likely to be executed. Different states have different standards. In Texas they recently executed a mentally retarded man.

It is not just the capital justice system that is broken, the whole justice system is broken. I found this out the hard way. It has taken a long time to get those in power to even look at the situation because many of them benefit from the corporations supporting the gulags in this country. We also know many innocent people have been sentenced to death row. We have news media who basically try people before the case ever gets heard by a jury. The juries are then tainted. This influences the largely corrupt and incompetent systems of prosecutors who also work with bad science. The laws are manipulated to be used against certain people and manipulated to let others be free of prosecution. Evidence is also either held back or manufactured so they can shape the case when the evidence is not supportive for guilt.  They use cases for their own notoriety and advancement. Judges do the same thing, influenced by public opinion which may not be based in truth due to the hype by the media or manipulations by prosecutors. Due process is often lost to a foregone conclusion of guilt.

A study commissioned by the institute said that decades of experience had proved that the system could not reconcile the twin goals of individualized decisions about who should be executed and systemic fairness. It added that capital punishment was plagued by racial disparities; was enormously expensive even as many defense lawyers were underpaid and some were incompetent; risked executing innocent people; and was undermined by the politics that come with judicial elections.

We always have a war on something in this country when someone behind the so called war is making money off of it, such as the war on crime or the war on drugs(which removed people from the role of patient and inserted them into the role of criminal in more than one way). The so called war on crime which was fueled by the right wing and corporations which made money off the supplying of or building of prisons. The legislature poured huge amounts of money into these so called wars due to being lobbied by companies.

By underpaid and often incompetent defense they mean public defenders. Indigent clients are not given a defense. If you truly have a justice system which is based on the accused being innocent until proven guilty in  an actual democracy you provide excellent defense for everyone accused. The truth is we have neither a fair justice system nor a democracy. Indigent clients are not given a defense. If the goal is to fill up the prisons so they are overflowing and more prisons have to be built you want to insure those accused have little or no defense. You also want to insure they will be harshly sentenced, thus lobbying for lengthy sentences. You will want to pass legislature to keep judges from using good common sense in sentencing(set sentencing), and three strike laws. You want to make sure little money is spent to support those in the community who could be kept out of the prisons with social services, support systems, education, or counseling.

Another piece of the puzzle to fill up the prisons is to make the mentally ill accountable even if they did not know what they were doing. Change the attitudes of the prosecutors, defense laws, the MSM, and thus the public that just because you have a debilitating mental illness is no excuse for striking out at one of your more frightening hallucinations or delusions. The mentally ill who often are homeless to begin with have been criminalized, preyed upon in prisons, denied medication or just given medication to oversedate them, and made sicker by being put in isolation because jail staff don't want to put up with the behavior of a mentally ill person. A system of plea bargaining is set because the defense lawyers for the indigent don’t have trial skills nor the time to prepare for a trial and the states do not want to fund defense. The states do however fund prosecutors and law enforcement to prosecute using often jail house snitches who are promised lowered sentences or special privileges for testimony, really bad science, and just plain old everyday blatant lies which people believe because a prosecutor is telling them. Prosecutor and liar are often synonymous and most people don’t know that until they themselves are affected by a legal case, then they are outraged and shocked. Some who have money for good lawyers have recently been in the news because their cases were dismissed due to prosecutorial misconduct. This does not happen if you are poor and they get away with much worse fabrications and lies with the powerless indigent population.

Things will look different come September, Professor Gross said.

“Law students who take first-year criminal law from 2010 on,” he said, “will learn that this same group of smart lawyers and judges — the ones whose work they read every day — has said that the death penalty in the United States is a moral and practical failure.”

The beginning of change, I am happy to see it. Let’s hope it doesn’t take too long many are suffering.