EddieArent:
States have the right to decide if they want to use the death penalty. The CCC and Catechism of Trent teach this. Bishops have their opinions on this, and likewise with others. It’s not a 100% issue as abortion. Though the anti-death penalty crowd would want you to believe since sweat hearts like Lee Mavo get to walk free.
…not being killed and getting to “walk free” are not really synonymous, to be fair.
As luck would have it, Archbishop Chaput wrote about this subject in his column for last week’s
Denver Catholic Register:
Supreme Court ruling on death penalty encouraging; now let’s do more
**Except in most extreme cases, death penalty cannot be justified **
On Tuesday last week, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 5-4 that the Constitution bars the execution of killers who were younger than 18 when they did their crimes. Until last week, such death sentences were legal in 19 states.
The decision revokes the death sentences of nearly six-dozen underage murderers. It also prevents any state from seeking to execute minors for future crimes.
From the Church’s perspective, this is important news; a victory for careful reflection and common decency. As Americans, we take great pride in our tradition of rule by law and the quality of our justice system. Much of that pride is well-earned.
Unfortunately, the deeper problem — the death penalty itself — remains with us. Here’s a simple fact: If the defendant in a murder trial is financially well off and white, he has a much lower chance of receiving the death penalty than if he’s poor or a person of color. In some states, the inability to hire a private attorney can amount to a death sentence.
Over the last decade, dozens of convicted “murderers” have walked off death row, exonerated by DNA evidence that proved their innocence. Wrongful convictions in capital cases are frightening enough. But even more troubling is what these miscarriages of justice imply: Many other innocent people have almost certainly died, executed for crimes they didn’t commit.
Experience shows that, quite apart from the serious flaws built into the death penalty in too many states, capital punishment simply doesn’t work as a deterrent. Nor does it heal or redress any wounds, because only forgiveness can do that. It does succeed though in answering violence with violence — a violence wrapped in the piety of state approval, which implicates all of us as citizens in the taking of more lives.
Turning away from capital punishment does not diminish our support for the families of murder victims. They bear a terrible burden of grief, and they rightly demand justice. Real murderers deserve punishment, but even murderers retain their God-given dignity as human beings. When we take a murderer’s life we only add to the violence in an already violent culture, and we demean our own dignity in the process. Moreover, we don’t need to do it. In the United States in 2005, the guilty can be punished and public safety can be ensured without sending a single human being to an execution chamber.
We should remember that Catholic teaching on the death penalty flows from the sanctity of the human person. All life is sacred. Every person, even the convicted murderer, is created by God with God-given dignity.
While both Scripture and Catholic tradition support the legitimacy of the death penalty under certain restricted conditions, the Church has repeatedly called us to a higher road over the past five decades as an antidote to the growing culture of death around us. We don’t need to kill people to protect society. We don’t need to kill people to punish the guilty. And we should never be in a hurry to take anyone’s life. As a result, except in the most extreme circumstances, capital punishment cannot be justified. In developed countries like our own, it should have no place in our public life.
In the wake of last week’s encouraging Supreme Court decision, we need to think carefully about the kind of justice we want to witness to our young people. Most American Catholics, like the vast majority of their fellow citizens, support the death penalty. That doesn’t make it right. But it does ensure that the wrong-headed lesson of violence “fixing” the violent among us will be taught to another generation. As children of God, we’re better than this, and we need to start acting like it. We need to end the death penalty now.
