Model Penal Code
Contents
Background
Drafted from 19542 to 1962 by lawyers from the American Law Institute, the Model Penal Code was written in an attempt to bring uniformity and simplicity to the very complex common law doctrine that had evolved in the United States. Since its first publication, the Model Penal Code has provided the basis for legislation in over two-thirds of American states. Many have adopted portions. New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania and Oregon have enacted most of the provisions.
No state has adopted the Model Penal Code in its entirety.[1]
Introduction to the Model Penal Code
The introduction to the Model Penal Code explains the origins and purposes of the code:
American criminal law is codified in fifty-two criminal codes. The federal
criminal code overlays the codes of each of the fifty states and the District of Columbia. Under the U.S. Constitution, the power to impose criminal liability is reserved primarily to the states, with federal authority limited to the prohibition and punishment of those unusual crimes specially related to federal interests (such as crimes committed on property of exclusive federal jurisdiction such as military bases, crimes against certain federal officers, and crimes that involve conduct in more than one state that is difficult for a single state to effectively prosecute, such as drug and organized crime offenses). The vast bulk of most crimes and essentially all “street” crimes—homicide, rape, robbery, assault, and theft—fall under jurisdiction of one of the fifty state criminal codes or the code of the District of Columbia. There is much diversity among these fifty-two criminal codes and, therefore, it is often difficult to state “the” American rule on any point of criminal law. But there also are many similarities among the codes, in large part due to the influence of the American Law Institute’s Model Penal Code. Promulgated in 1962, the Code prompted a wave of state code reforms in the 1960’s and 1970’s, each influenced to some extent by the Model Code. Some of the Model Penal Code provisions have not been widely accepted. For example, while the Model Penal Code generally rejects the common law’s “felony murder” rule, which in its broadest form holds all killings in the course of a felony to be murder, most states have retained the rule. Similarly, a majority of states have rejected the Model Penal Code’s innovation in prescribing the same punishment for inchoate offenses, such as attempt, and consummated offenses. Nonetheless, the Model Penal Code, more than any other code, is the closest thing to being an American criminal code. The federal criminal code is too unsystematic and incomplete in theory and too irrelevant in practice to function as a national code. Where states have not followed the Model Code, the divergences locate points of controversy that often continue today. And the Code and its proposals have been the intellectual focus
of much American criminal law scholarship since the Code’s promulgation. [2]
Basic Structure of the Model Penal Code
The Model Penal Code has three parts: General Provisions, Definition of Specific Crimes, and Treatment & Corrections.
