In 1962 The American Legal Institute – consisting of over 4,000 Judges and lawyers – created the “Model Penal Code” for re-instituting capital punishment. After 30+ years, the institute has pulled its support of the “Model Penal Code” in part, “…in light of the current intractable institutional and structural obstacles to ensuring a minimally adequate system for administering capital punishment.”
As an observer of our courts – I can tell you without contradiction – they are broke! Heaven forbid you or your loved one “looks good” for a capital crime if you don’t the 50k to defend it. Otherwise? You are going down whether you did it or not!
Here is the link to the entire 114 page report behind their decision to withdraw their support for capital punishment and a few selective quotes: …
http://www.ali.org/doc/Capital%20Punishment_web.pdf
“Evidence suggests a higher rate of erroneous convictions in capital versus non-capital cases, and there is little reason to believe that the problem of wrongful convictions and executions will be solved in
the foreseeable future.”
“Discrimination permeated both the selection of those to die as well as the selection of those who could participate in the criminal justice process. African Americans were more frequently executed for
non-homicidal crimes, were more likely to be executed without appeals, and were more likely to be executed at young ages.105 Discrimination was most pronounced in Southern jurisdictions. The most obvious discrimination occurred in capital rape prosecutions, as such prosecutions almost uniformly targeted minority offenders alleged to have assaulted white victims, and the numerous executions for rape post-1930 (455) were entirely confined to Southern jurisdictions, border states, and the District of Columbia.”
“African-American defendants convicted of raping white females faced a greater than one-third chance of receiving a death sentence whereas all other racial combinations yielded death sentences in about two percent of cases.”
I wouldn’t doubt any of the race bias or other concerns listed in your letter. Perhaps the best approach is to educate young people not to “look good” for a capital, or any crime. Odds are that a repeat offender may not be guilty of a particular crime, but is probably guilty of some crime. And if one innocent person is executed along with 9 actual murderers, that’s probably an acceptable ratio.