American Law Institute and Capital Punishment

The American Law Institute (A.L.I.) produces restatements of the law, model codes, and principles of law. This group of lawyers, judges, academics, and law librarians deliberatively comments on both what the law is and what the law should be. Notably, the ALI promoted their model penal code for adoption by the fifty states. With many variations and exceptions, they were largely successful.

The ALI membership in the 1960's included in the model penal code provisions detailing and implicitly ratifying the death penalty. As the New York Times reported last week, the ALI voted last year to withdraw the model code's sections concerning capital punishment.

The vote followed from the ALI's report on the death penalty, available here in pdf.

-- Patrick Flanagan