In 2009, 106 people were sentenced to death — the fewest since the death penalty was reinstated in 1976, NPR reports.
And the American Law Institute has abandoned its 50-year effort on the issue, according to The New York Times.
The institute is a group of 4,000 judges, lawyers and law professors that one academic describes as providing "the only intellectually respectable support for the death penalty system in the United States.”
A study the institute commissioned concluded that the system couldn't reconcile the goals of individualized decisions about who should be executed and systemic fairness. It said capital punishment was beset by racial disparities; was expensive even as many defense lawyers were underpaid and some were incompetent; risked executing innocent people; and was undermined by the politics of judicial elections.
The institute essentially has concluded that "the death penalty in the United States is a moral and practical failure,” says Samuel Gross, a University of Michigan law professor.