The death penalty is "a moral and practical failure"

The American Law Institute has turned out the lights and locked the doors. It is a fundamental decision, for as Adam Liptak of the New York Times wrote:

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.

As a result:

“Law students who take first-year criminal law from 2010 on,” [Samuel Gross, a law professor at the University of Michigan] said, “will learn that this same group of smart lawyers and judges — the ones whose work they read every day — has said that the death penalty in the United States is a moral and practical failure.”