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Why the Death Penalty is
Still Necessary
July 21,
2016
Given the
Church’s longstanding and irreformable teaching that death may in principle be
a legitimate punishment for grievous crimes, the key issue for Catholics is an
empirical and practical question.
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Detail
from “An Execution in Rome for Murder, 1820" by Richard Bridgens
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Editor’s
note: This is
Part 2 of a two-part article on Catholicism and the death penalty. Part 1 was
titled "Why the Church Cannot Reverse Past Teaching on Capital Punishment" and was posted on July 17th.
As we showed in Part
1 of this essay, for two millennia the Catholic Church has taught
that the death penalty can be a legitimate punishment for heinous crimes, not
merely to protect the public from the immediate danger posed by the offender
but also to secure retributive justice and to deter serious crime. This
was the uniform teaching of scripture and the Fathers and Doctors of the
Church, and it was reaffirmed by popes and also codified in the universal
catechism of the Church promulgated by Pope St. Pius V in the sixteenth
century, as well as in numerous local catechisms.
Consider the standard language of
the Baltimore Catechism, which was used throughout Catholic parishes in
the United States for educating children in the faith for much of the twentieth
century:
Q. 1276. Under what circumstances may human life be lawfully taken?A. Human life may be lawfully taken: 1. In self-defense, when we are unjustly attacked and have no other means of saving our own lives; 2. In a just war, when the safety or rights of the nation require it; 3. By the lawful execution of a criminal, fairly tried and found guilty of a crime punishable by death when the preservation of law and order and the good of the community require such execution. 1
Thus, killing another human being
in self-defense, during a just war, or through the lawful execution of a
criminal does not violate the Fifth Commandment’s rule “Thou shall not kill”
(which many modern editions of the Bible translate as “Thou shall not murder”).
The permissibility of these three types of lawful killing (unlike the
deliberate killing of the innocent, which is always prohibited) depends on
contingent circumstances. As long as (in the words of Pope Innocent III)
“the punishment is carried out not in hatred but with good judgment, not inconsiderately
but after mature deliberation,” the death penalty may be imposed if it
genuinely serves the common good.
Generally, the Church has left
these and similar prudential judgments to public officials. For example,
the current Catechism of the Catholic Church expressly affirms that when
it comes to judging whether a decision to go to war is morally justified, “the
evaluation of these conditions for moral legitimacy belongs to the prudential
judgment of those who have the responsibility for the common good.” The
institutional Church respects the authority and responsibility of public
officials, guided by the sound moral principles it preserves and promulgates,
to make these judgments. Similarly, to the best of our knowledge, the Church
has fully respected the authority of lawmakers to write statutes on
self-defense that detail the conditions under which individuals may use force,
including deadly force, to protect themselves and others.
Unfortunately, in recent years
churchmen have not been equally respectful of the authority and duty of public
officials to exercise their prudential judgments in applying Catholic teaching
when it comes to the death penalty, despite the fact that churchmen bring to
the debate over capital punishment no particular expertise derived from
their religious training and pastoral experience. Given the Church’s
longstanding and irreformable teaching that death may in principle be a
legitimate punishment for grievous crimes, the key issue for Catholics is the empirical
and practical question of whether the death penalty more effectively
promotes public safety and the common good than do lesser punishments. We
maintain that it does and thus devote about half of our forthcoming book, By
Man Shall His Blood Be Shed: A Catholic Defense of the Death Penalty, to
making this case.
The current Catechism of the
Catholic Church affirms that “[l]egitimate public authority has the
right and the duty to inflict punishment proportionate to the gravity of the
offense” and that “[p]unishment has the primary aim of redressing the
disorder introduced by the offense.” 2
Thus, punishment is fundamentally retributive, inflicting on the offender a
penalty commensurate with the gravity of his crime, though it may serve other
purposes as well, such as incapacitating the offender, deterring others, and
promoting the offender’s rehabilitation.
The significance of this point
cannot be overstated. Secular critics of capital punishment often reject
the very idea of retribution—the principle that an offender simply deserves
a punishment proportionate to the gravity of his offense—but no Catholic can
possibly do so. For unless an offender deserves a certain
punishment—whether that be a fine, imprisonment, or whatever—and deserves a
punishment of that specific degree of severity, then it would be unjust
to inflict the punishment on him. Hence all the other ends of
punishment—deterrence, rehabilitation, protection of society, and so
on—presuppose the retributive aim of giving the offender what he deserves. This
is why the Catechism promulgated by Pope St. John Paul II reaffirms the
traditional Catholic teaching that retribution is the “primary aim” of
punishment.
Among the many reasons why
capital punishment ought to be preserved (all of which we set out at length in
our forthcoming book), the most fundamental one is that for extremely
heinous crimes, no lesser punishment could possibly respect this Catholic
principle that a punishment ought to be proportional to the offense.
We devote the remainder of this article to developing this point.
In the American states today the
only crime for which the death penalty may be imposed (according to U. S.
Supreme Court decisions) is murder. (The Court has not ruled on the
legitimacy of the death penalty for the national crimes of treason and
espionage.) Western societies, both before and after the rise of
Christianity, never imposed the death penalty for all unlawful killings.
As far back as our records go, laws reserved the ultimate punishment for intentional
and malicious killings and usually imposed a lesser punishment for
negligent killings and those resulting from a “heat of passion.” The
thirty-one American states with capital punishment today are even more
selective, reserving the death penalty for the most heinous murders, such as
multiple murders, rape murders, torture murders, and the murders of the very young
and the very old.
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Samuel
kills Agag
Artist: MERIAN, Matthaeus the Elder But Samuel said, “As your sword has made women childless, so shall your mother be childless among women.” And Samuel hacked Agag in pieces before the Lord in Gilgal. - I Samuel 15:33 (NKJV) http:// |
A close analysis of the 43
murderers executed in 2012 reveals the true depravity of the crimes and the
criminals that merit the death penalty in the United States today. Here
are nine of the cases (space does not allow a complete listing):
• David Alan Gore, who, with his cousin, cruised central Florida in the 1970s and 1980s, abducting, raping, and murdering at least half a dozen teenage girls (and the mother of one of them). In his last murder, the 17-year-old girl, repeatedly raped by Gore, had managed to free herself and then ran naked from the house where she was being held. Gore chase down the girl, dragged her back towards the house, and shoot her twice in the head in the driveway in full view of 15-year-old boy who was bicycling past the scene.• Edwin Hart Turner, who during a robbery shot and killed an unresisting convenience store clerk pleading for his life and then shortly thereafter robbed a customer at a gas station and shot and killed him while he was on the ground also pleading for his life.• Robert Brian Waterhouse, who early one morning left a bar with a 29-year-old woman and later beat her with a hard instrument, raped her, and sexually assaulted her with a large object. She was alive throughout this assault. He then dragged his victim into the water where she died of drowning. She was discovered completely naked and her injuries were so severe that she was unrecognizable. Fourteen years before, Waterhouse had broken into a home and killed a 77-year-old woman, for which he served 8 years before being paroled.• Timothy Shaun Stemple, who murdered his wife to collect her life insurance by beating her in the head with a baseball bat, driving a truck over her head, beating her again, driving the truck over her chest, and then driving over her at 60 miles per hour, killing her. While awaiting trial Stemple tried to get other inmates to arrange the death of several witnesses in his case.• Henry Curtis Jackson, who, in an attempt to steal money from his mother’s home, murdered a 2-year–old girl, a 2-year-old boy, a 3-year-old boy, and a 5-year-old girl. He injured two other older girls and stabbed a 1-year-old girl, leaving her unable to walk.• Daniel Wayne Cook, who, with an accomplice, killed a 26-year-old man after beating, torturing, and sodomizing him over a 6-7 hour period. A few hours later the offenders sodomized and strangled to death a 16-year-old boy.• Robert Wayne Harris, who in retaliation for his firing from a car wash, murdered the manager and four other employees by shooting them in the back of the head at close range while they were kneeling on the floor. Another survived but was left with permanent disabilities. When he was being interviewed by police about this crime, he volunteered that he had previously abducted and murdered a woman and he led police to her remains in a field.• Richard Dale Stokley, who with an accomplice abducted two 13-year-old girls from a campsite, drove them to a remote area, raped them, stabbed them in the eye, killed them by stomping on their necks, and then threw the naked bodies down an abandoned mineshaft.• Manuel Pardo, Jr., who killed seven men and two women in five separate incidents over a four-month period.
Altogether, the forty-three
offenders executed in 2012 killed a total of 70 individuals and injured another
12 during the capital crimes for which they were executed. We also know
that eight of the forty-three (19%) had previously killed at least one other
person, and several had killed more than one. And many of those who had
not (as far as we know) killed in the past had previously committed other very
serious crimes. Altogether, at least two-thirds of those executed in 2012
had previously committed a homicide, sexual assault, robbery, felony assault,
or kidnapping.
As these facts and a wealth of
other data show, we reserve the death penalty in the United States for the most
heinous murders and the most brutal and conscienceless murderers. This is
not, as some critics argue, a kind of state-run lottery that randomly chooses
an unlucky few for the ultimate penalty from among all those convicted of
murder. Rather, the capital punishment system is a filter that selects the
worst of the worst. Here is one particularly telling statistic:
of the murders that resulted in the 43 executions in 2012, more than a third
involved the rape of the murder victim or of another person either by the
executed offender or his accomplice. Yet, among all homicides in the
United States in recent decades, only about 1% involved a sexual assault.
In nearly all of the thirty-one American states that currently have the death
penalty, legislators have identified rape murder as especially heinous and thus
potentially deserving a death sentence. Indeed, before someone can be
executed in the United States legislators must agree that the kind of murder
committed potentially merits death and prosecutors and juries must agree that
this particular murderer deserves to die for his crime(s).
Put another way, to sentence
killers like those described above to less than death would fail to do
justice because the penalty – presumably a long period in prison – would be
grossly disproportionate to the heinousness of the crime.
Prosecutors, jurors, and the loved ones of murder victims understand this
essential point. As the mother of the murder victim of one of those
executed in 2012 said to the sentencing jury, “I would beg this court and this
jury to see that justice is done. And justice to us is no less than the
death penalty.” Even offenders themselves sometimes recognize that
justice demands their death, as three of those executed in 2012 fully
acknowledged. One who killed two men after a minor traffic accident said,
“I killed two people. I’ve always accepted responsibility for the taking
of their lives. . . . I believe in justice and I believe that the
victims, their hatred, their anger, they need to have justice.” Another
who killed a 63-year-old prison guard during an escape attempt pleaded guilty
and waived all appeals, resulting in his execution just one year after
sentencing. In a letter he wrote a week before his execution he commended
the prosecutor and affirmed the justice of his punishment: “I do not want
or desire to die, instead I deserve to die; this I have always stated.”
In concluding he wrote, “It’s not about me or any future killers, it is about
ensuring that in contested cases that the victims and their families get their
intended and needed swift justice.” And one who abducted, raped, and
murdered a 9-year-old girl told a federal court, “I killed the little
girl. It’s just that the punishment be concluded. I believe it’s a
good thing, that the death penalty does inhibit further criminal acts.”
He added, “I killed. I deserve to be killed.”
We have focused here on the
retributive purpose of the death penalty because, again, according to Catholic
doctrine retribution is the “primary aim” of punishment. In By
Man Shall His Blood Be Shed we also show that capital punishment has
various practical benefits, such as protecting prison guards and other inmates
from the most dangerous offenders, and protecting members of the community by
giving “lifers” who escape from prison strong reasons not to kill while on the
run. We also argue that capital punishment almost certainly deters at least
some potential murderers, and gives murderers a strong incentive to plea
bargain to very long prison sentences, which likely saves lives by increasing
the deterrent and incapacitative effect of long prison sentences over shorter
ones. (We also refute the common charges that the capital punishment
system in the United States results in the execution of the innocent and
discriminates against minorities and the poor.)
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But make no mistake:
retributive punishment in and of itself makes the world a safer place and
upholds the common good:
• It powerfully reinforces society’s condemnation of the crime of murder, making it less likely that those growing up in a community with the death penalty would even consider killing someone in the first place.• It anchors the entire schedule of punishments for serious crimes to the principle of just deserts, ensuring the survival of retributive punishment as a key element in the criminal justice system and thus shoring up the schedule of punishments against powerful modern tendencies toward ever greater leniency in criminal punishment.• It reassures the families and other loved ones of the victims of grave crimes that they live in a society that is just, and that shows respect for the lives of victims by inflicting on their killers a penalty that is truly proportionate to the gravity of the offense.• It encourages repentance insofar as it makes offenders aware of the extreme gravity of their crimes and also of the shortness of the time remaining to them to get themselves right with God and to ask forgiveness from the families of their victims.• Perhaps most importantly, in its supreme gravity it promotes belief in and respect for the majesty of the moral order and for the system of human law that both derives from and supports that moral order.
For well over a millennium the
popes of the Catholic Church exercised civil authority over a large swath of
territory in central Italy called the Papal States. In that capacity they
frequently authorized the death penalty for murderers and others.
Although we do not have data for how often they did so before the nineteenth
century, we know that between 1796 and 1865, six popes authorized a total of
516 executions, four-fifths for murder.
This papal endorsement of capital punishment, though rather recent in the history of the Church, is largely ignored in Catholic debates over the death penalty, as is the striking fact that from 1929 to 1969 the criminal code of the Vatican City itself included the death penalty for the attempted assassination of the pope. The many dozens of popes who approved executions in the Papal States and the representatives of the Church responsible for the Vatican City criminal code understood a truth that too many in the modern Church have forgotten: that justice demands the death penalty for the most heinous crimes and that if “the punishment is carried out not in hatred but with good judgment, not inconsiderately but after mature deliberation,” it promotes public safety and serves the larger common good.
This papal endorsement of capital punishment, though rather recent in the history of the Church, is largely ignored in Catholic debates over the death penalty, as is the striking fact that from 1929 to 1969 the criminal code of the Vatican City itself included the death penalty for the attempted assassination of the pope. The many dozens of popes who approved executions in the Papal States and the representatives of the Church responsible for the Vatican City criminal code understood a truth that too many in the modern Church have forgotten: that justice demands the death penalty for the most heinous crimes and that if “the punishment is carried out not in hatred but with good judgment, not inconsiderately but after mature deliberation,” it promotes public safety and serves the larger common good.
ENDNOTES:
1 The Baltimore Catechism is available from
many online sources. The death penalty is addressed in the third volume
of the catechism, which is for older students. See www.baltimore-catechism.com/lesson33.htm,
accessed June 4, 2015.
2 Catechism of the Catholic Church, Second
Edition (Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1997), sec. 2266, p. 546.
About the Author
Edward
Feser
Edward Feser is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Pasadena City College.
Edward Feser is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Pasadena City College.
About the Author
Joseph M.
Bessette
Joseph M. Bessette is Alice Tweed Tuohy Professor of Government and Ethics at Claremont McKenna College.
Joseph M. Bessette is Alice Tweed Tuohy Professor of Government and Ethics at Claremont McKenna College.
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