In “The Death Penalty Deserves the Death Penalty,” an article in the April 15 issue of The New Yorker, author Lincoln Caplan examines the history of capital punishment in America. Caplan, a senior research scholar at Yale Law School, discusses the ALI’s Model Penal Code and a case before the U.S. Supreme Court this year that focuses on the drugs used in lethal injections.
Caplan describes The American Law Institute as “the country’s most prestigious legal organization involved in law reform,” and writes that ALI was “the architect of the Supreme Court’s approach to reforming the use of the death sentence.” But in 2009, the ALI withdrew the death penalty provisions from the Model Penal Code in a vote that Caplan describes as a conclusion that “the endless political controversy surrounding the penalty, as well as many other factors, make it impossible to ensure ‘a minimally adequate system for administering capital punishment.’ ” Read the New Yorker article.