§ 3.03 MODEL PENAL CODE

• Jurisdiction: North Carolina

§ 3.03. Model Penal Code²¹

Although criminal code drafting by legislatures was a major project in the United States through the first half of the nineteenth century, subsequent codification and reform efforts stalled. One result of this long neglect of penal reform was "a substantive criminal law that was often archaic, inconsistent, unfair, and unprincipled."²² Therefore, in 1952 the American Law Institute (ALI), an organization composed of prominent judges, lawyers, and law professors, began to draft a penal code intended to inspire a new reformative spirit among state legislatures. In 1962, after completion of13 tentative drafts and accompanying explanatory commentaries, the ALI approved and published its Proposed Official Draft of the Model Penal Code, a carefully drafted code containing general principles of criminal responsibility, definitions of specific offenses, and sentencing provisions.

In 1999, the ALI determined that its sentencing provisions, which were inspired by the rehabilitative goals of the 1950s and 1960s, were outdated, so it approved a project to reformulate its sentencing provisions, which was completed in 20 17.²³ And, in 2012, the Institute approved another project, this one to revise the Code's sexual offense provisions, which although progressive at the time of their adoption in the 1960s, have become woefully outdated in view of changing societal mores.²⁴ This project is currently underway.

The impact of the Model Penal Code on American criminal law has been "stunning."²⁵ Although the Code is not the law, in whole, in any jurisdiction—it is, after all, a model penal code — it heavily influenced adoption of revised penal codes in 34 states.²⁶ And "[t]housands of court opinions have cited the Model Penal Code as persuasive authority for the interpretation of an existing [non-MPC] statute or in the exercise of a court's occasional power to formulate a criminal law doctrine."²⁷ As Professor Sanford Kadish has aptly put it, the Model Penal Code "has become a standard part of the furniture of the criminal law."²⁸

Many criminal law professors treat the Model Penal Code as "the principal text in criminal law teaching,"²⁹ because its influence on the law has been so dramatic. As a consequence, this text considers in detail both the common law and Model Penal Code, the primary sources of modern statutory law.

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^[21] . See generally Commentary Symposium, Model Penal Code Second: Good or Bad Idea?, 1 Ohio St. J. Crim. L...