Intelectualmente muerta la Pena de Muerte en EEUU

Sería muy bueno que los miembros del PVEM y sus seguidores lean esta nota, uno de los más importantes grupos que se dedicaban a dar respaldo intelectual al sistema de pena de muerte de los Estados Unidos ha renunciado a continuar haciéndolo pues considera el proyecto un fracaso. Las razones son que el sistema no puede ser aplicado de una manera justa (fairness), está plagado de disparidades raciales, es caro, tiene el riesgo de ejecutar inocentes y está relacionado con la política que rodea las elecciones judiciales.

El American Law Institute pretendía hacer el sistema efectivo, y como los abogados de la pena de muerte en México, que ésta sólo fuera aplicada a ciertos casos (homicidio). Creado en 1962 el marco conceptual ha fallado.

Excelentes noticias para comenzar el 2010!

La pena de muerte seguirá en los EEUU, pero este es un paso importantísimo, pues al quedarse sin respaldo intelectual, ésta sanción está condenada a muerte, que sea la última.

Al final del artículo Liptak cita a Samuel Gross, profesor en Michigan, quien dice que "a partir de 2010 los estudiantes de derecho penal aprenderán que la pena de muerte (en los Estados Unidos) es un fracaso moral y práctico".

Group Gives Up Death Penalty Work
By ADAM LIPTAK
NEW YORK 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number of death sentences continued to fall, Ohio switched to a single chemical for lethal injections and New Mexico repealed its death penalty entirely.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.
“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.”
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