(Abstract Only)

The American Law Institute has launched a revision of its Model Penal Code provisions on sentencing and punishment that will be comprehensive in almost all respects. Conspicuously missing from the new sentencing project, however, is any examination of the Model Penal Code's provisions on capital punishment. I argue that a reexamination of capital punishment is both necessary and practical as part of the larger sentencing reform project. Avoiding the death penalty is unprincipled and would leave the Model Code's single weakest section standing while every other sentencing provision would be subject to scrutiny. Failure to consider capital punishment would also ignore 40 years of radical change in both the penal policy of developed nations and the vocabulary of concern that had redefined the death penalty as an issue of human rights and limits of government power. Ignoring the death penalty would launch a reform effort that would ignore the punishment for murder while rethinking everything else. Nothing short of terror at the political cost can explain this retreat from the natural boundaries of sentencing reform.