I could have sworn someone here posted this link but I’ve scrolled through the last 2 threads and can’t find it.

nytimes.com

Group Gives Up Death Penalty Work

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number of death sentences continued to fall, Ohio switched to a single chemical for lethal injections and New Mexico repealed its death penalty entirely.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

I hate to say it but I think they might be right. I’d love to be able to say I’m very pro-death penalty but I don’t think we can trust our system to use it even-handedly or even to be postitive the person charged is actually guilty.