The American Bar Association has released a new pub­li­ca­tion, The State of Criminal Justice 2015, exam­in­ing major issues, trends, and sig­nif­i­cant changes in America’s crim­i­nal jus­tice sys­tem. The chap­ter devot­ed to cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment was writ­ten by Ronald Tabak, an attor­ney at Skadden Arps and board mem­ber of the Death Penalty Information Center. Tabak presents evi­dence of the declin­ing use of the death penal­ty in death sen­tences and exe­cu­tions, par­tic­u­lar­ly not­ing the grow­ing geo­graph­ic iso­la­tion of the death penal­ty. He includes recent devel­op­ments, such as the mora­to­ri­um on exe­cu­tions in Pennsylvania and ongo­ing con­tro­ver­sy and secre­cy sur­round­ing meth­ods of exe­cu­tion. He also high­lights numer­ous stud­ies and cas­es regard­ing inno­cence and racial bias. He con­cludes, “[I]t is vital that the legal pro­fes­sion and the pub­lic be bet­ter informed about what is real­ly going on in the cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment sys­tem.… Ultimately, our soci­ety must decide whether to con­tin­ue with a sys­tem that can­not sur­vive any seri­ous cost/​benefit analysis.”

(R. Tabak, ​“Capital Punishment,” American Bar Association, in The State of Criminal Justice 2015; DPIC post­ed August 5, 2015). See Studies.

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