Leave them alone! They know what to do, nature will handle it. You do NOT have to clean them out. The pitchers will start to brown, LEAVE THEM BE! Do not cut them off right now. New pitchers will form.

OK, should you let the pitchers stay on the plant till they rot off or is it OK to cut them off once they turn crinkly brown and dry?

I decided I'd give it another try ,so after some rain I let whatever was in the pitchers soak for a while. Then I CAREFULLY tapped the pitchers against a bar at my window.(up and down along the height of the pitchers)
As a result ,most of the stuff is out now and my pitchers can start munching on critters again.Since they still have some months to grow I guess they could use the new room to snack. The plant is otherwise healthy and sending up new pitchers.

I agree with "tommyr", let them be. The bugs are still being digested and the pool of thoroughly. Catching new insects will only cuase the leaf to to start all over to thoroughly digest these.

Once the trap begins to die off, starting from the hood. The leaf will began to obsorbe the protain mush from its surrounding walls of the trap. Once the browning progresses downward, the plant is oborbing the sugars the trap has manufactured during its life span of the leaf and moving them to the rhizome of the plant to be stored as starch. So the best time to cut an old leaf is when it is totally brown, crinkled, and dry.

The rhizome needs to collect as much starch as it can to survive the dormancy period and to convert to energy for the production of new leaves and flowers for next year.

Just remember that overflowing pitchers are a product of nature. Nature knows how to get itself out of this situation, too. I've seen my Sarracenia get pretty full, but not completely full. I was surprised to see that a day or 2 later, the pitcher had digested around 25% of the bugs. Just let the plant do what it does best, because that's the fun of growing these things to begin with. It's good to marvel at how a plant actually eats members of the animal kingdom. They've been doing it for millions of years, so they've had time to plan for a full pitcher.

I'll will add something about my last post.

Dang!

I really need to proof read my comments before posting them! Example: "The bugs are still being digested and the pool of thoroughly", which I meant to say "The bugs are thoroughly digested in the pool" and I left out something like this "and the dissolved nutrients are easily absorbed through the walls of the pitcher". Or how about "the plant is oborbing the sugars the trap". I hope you get what I as trying to say is that the sugars are then being obsorbed by the trap's walls.

With all the moving of sentences, cutting and pasting sentences, I made a real mass on the comment field. Sorry if I caused any confusion, I had a chance to fixed it on preview but I didn't. Really does make me look like an amateur of the worse kind.

That's all right, I did get what you tried to say.
And as for leaving the dead stuff in; I only "cleaned out" some of the bigger pitchers,most of the smaller ones and a couple of the bigger ones still have their snacks in them so my plant won't go hungry.
What I do wonder is whether this pile of dead critters actually "smells",(I don't smell anything) because in the beginning of the growing season the plant usually caught ants, some bees and every now ant then a spider, nowadays my plant is surrounded by flies.(and catching them)