The good news is the death penalty is being enacted less and less given it has been proven empirically to be a complete failure as a deterrent.

Last fall, the American Law Institute, which created the intellectual framework for the modern capital justice system almost 50 years ago, pronounced its project a failure and walked away from it.

There were other important death penalty developments last year: the number of death sentences continued to fall, Ohio switched to a single chemical for lethal injections and New Mexico repealed its death penalty entirely. But not one of them was as significant as the institute’s move, which represents a tectonic shift in legal theory.

Stephen Colbert talks with Barry Scheck of the Innocence Project about the death penalty. The group has used DNA to exonerate over 249 wrongly convicted people sitting on death row.