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The New York Times has an article detailing a major shift in the debate over capital punishment in the United States. This is a pretty big deal. The American Law Institute more or less built the foundation that the U.S. Supreme Court used to reinsitute capital punishment. They have just walked away from their work of the last five decades. “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. 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.
I would have to say this is pretty good news for justice. I know, however, Delegate John Overington (R-Berkeley) isn't going to be happy. He has been trying to reinstate the death penalty in West Virginia for the last two decades, even going as far as to ambush a bill last session with an amendment on the floor of the WV House of Delegates that, by all rights, should have been brought up for a committee vote beforehand. I have also heard that our Governor is pro-death penalty. Hopefully, this development will inspire him to change that position. Not that it is needed, though. Death penalty advocates have long stood on shaky ground in West Virginia. Most, if not all of them claim to be fiscal conservatives. The problem they run into is that time and time again research shows cases involving capital punishment cost more than litigating cases that involve maximum prison sentences. This information is important, given West Virginia's impending Criminal Justice Reform debate. We have some serious issues with prison overcrowding in West Virginia. They demand serious debate, not blatant political stunts meant to keep your name in the papers. |
