Adam Liptak had a nice article in today’s New York Times discussing the American Law Institute’s abandoning any further recommendations on the death penalty. At http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/05/us/05bar.html?ref=us I like the contrast he drew with these two paragraphs: “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.’ That last sentence contains some pretty dense lawyer talk, but it can be untangled. What the institute was saying is that the capital justice system in the United States is irretrievably broken.”