Juan Melendez, human rights activist who was wrongly convicted of murder and spent over 17 years on Death Row, at a 2006 meeting in the eventually successful campaign to end the death penalty in New Jersey. Photo by John Goodwin.

Another major step forward, and this one is significant for the long term. From yesterday’s NY Times:

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number of death sentences continued to fall, Ohio switched to a single chemical for lethal injections and New Mexico repealed its death penalty entirely.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

A couple more quotes:

“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.”

…A study commissioned by the institute said that decades of experience had proved that the system could not reconcile the twin goals of individualized decisions about who should be executed and systemic fairness. It added that capital punishment was plagued by racial disparities; was enormously expensive even as many defense lawyers were underpaid and some were incompetent; risked executing innocent people; and was undermined by the politics that come with judicial elections.

Roger S. Clark, who teaches at the Rutgers School of Law in Camden, N.J., and was one of the leaders of the movement to have the institute condemn the death penalty outright, said he was satisfied with the compromise. “Capital punishment is going to be around for a while,” Professor Clark said. “What this does is pull the plug on the whole intellectual underpinnings for it.”

The day before, the Times editorialized on the fact that the US, which has less than 5 % of the world’s population but about one-quarter of its prisoners, is no longer expanding its prisons: for financial reasons.

For the long term prospects on ending the death penalty, see “The Death Penalty Is Losing” by Glen Stassen, the noted Baptist ethicist, theologian and peace activist, in Tikkun. The associated photo essay by John Goodwin about how the death penalty was ended in New Jersey, highlighting the people from all walks of life who made it happen, is one of my favorite pieces in Tikkun in the last couple of years, but I only now realize we never got it online (the text is there but only one of the photos): you can always buy a single copy here!

Note: I caught this news thanks to my friend Sujatha Baliga’s facebook entries. Send us the good news we need to hear! A diet of misery isn’t good for the soul and it isn’t even an accurate  reflection of the world. Email me at dave@tikkun.org.