Death penalty advocates going out of business
Here’s an interesting development: ”Last fall, the American Law Institute, which created the intellectual framework for the modern capital justice system almost 50 years ago, pronounced its project a failure and walked away from it.”
“… the institute voted in October to disavow the structure it had created “in light of the current intractable institutional and structural obstacles to ensuring a minimally adequate system for administering capital punishment.
“That last sentence contains some pretty dense lawyer talk, but it can be untangled. What the institute was saying is that the capital justice system in the United States is irretrievably broken.
“A study commissioned by the institute said that decades of experience have proved that the system cannot reconcile the twin goals of individualized decisions about who should be executed and systemic fairness. It added that capital punishment is plagued by racial disparities; is enormously expensive even as many defense lawyers are underpaid and some are incompetent; risks executing innocent people; and is undermined by the politics that come with judicial elections.” http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/05/us/05bar.html?hp
Those comments surely ring true with our experience in Illinois.
In a sense, it says more about the inadequacies in the criminal justice system than about the rightness or wrongness about the death penalty.
Since the reinstitution of the death penalty in 1976 there have been 1,188 executions in the United States. By closing time today there will have been 3,846 abortions in America (assuming 1.2 million a year with executions going on six days a week).
And some wonder why pro-lifers care about this above any other issue.
Some wonder why some pro-lifers can’t care about all life issues.
And some wonder why pro-lifers care about this above any other issue.
Eggloff,
Abortion is permitted by the state, and in some cases those who seek abortion may be aided by the state. But when it comes to capital punishment, it is the state that does the killing, after excruciatingly long deliberations involving large numbers of people. Some may think it makes things better that so many people and so much time and deliberation are involved in deciding to proceed with an execution. But that is precisely why I find it so horrifying.
Wow, gratuitous abortion reference by the second post. They’re getting faster in opening their rabbit holes to redirect any post on any topic away from whatever and toward abortion.
Margaret,
Many who are anti-abortion do care about the death penalty, but in terms of sheer numbers, there is no comparison. Not even close.
David,
The state has withdrawn protection from a group of humans and said, kill them if you wish. Moreover, the state will not only not protect them, the state will protect your right to kill them. This is a monstrous violation of human rights by the perpetrators and that includes the state.
“Some wonder why some pro-lifers can’t care about all life issues.”
Well … it is possible to be pro-life and not oppose the death penalty in all instances. But that moves the conversation to the realm of prudential reasoning, which makes for difficult discussions and hard thinking.
The great thing about buying into and advocating a consistent ethic of life as to all life issues–e.g., abortion, ESCR, euthanasia, the death penalty–is not so much that each issue is as important as another, or that the solution to one issue is identical to the solution to another, but that placing human dignity and human rights as the focal points of one’s thinking results in a paradigmatic shift in one’s attitude about the inter-connectedness of all life issues. True, numbers are a factor, but to play one life issue against another risks damaging the consistency that gives CEL both its attraction and its moral suasion.
Just my opinion.
A cause for rejoicing, no? The legal beagles that shaped death penalty law for the last fifty years have decided it can’t be done with justice.
Well … it is possible to be pro-life and not oppose the death penalty in all instances. But that moves the conversation to the realm of prudential reasoning, which makes for difficult discussions and hard thinking.
Jim,
Pope John Paul II said
So (to quote myself from a very recent Vox Nova message) when George Bush signed 152 death warrants as governor of Texas, he made 152 prudential decisions in a row that something that should be “very rare, if not practically non-existent” was “absolutely necessary.” How likely does that seem?
Saying something is a matter of prudential judgment is not saying it’s just a matter of opinion. And although one may never make a prudential judgment to have an abortion or to perform one, just about any other decision regarding abortion is a prudential judgment, including what to do about it if you are the president of the United States. Father Komonchak said back in April:
I apologize to Margaret Steinfels for taking the bait and getting into the abortion issue. But I just hate to see abortion used to trivialize concern about issues like capital punishment, torture, and war.
While I oppose the death penalty in virtually all cases, I think this is a cop out. Be honest and say you don’t support it as a matter of policy or morality. The idea that the death penalty is impossible to administer under the Constitution must mean the founders were idiots since they clearly contemplated it. What has made it so Byzantine isn’t the Constitution, it’s all the nonsense that we lawyers have layered over it. The idea of near absolute systemic fairness is fantasy.
The reason the Church allows the death penalty in order to defend society and the reason the Church will never take it off the table completely is that society must have the option to defend itself. While it is true, in the West we live in societies with advanced prison systems, there is no guarantee we will not live in a state of nature in say 50 years. Moreover, much of the world lives in a state of nature without advanced prison systems and the Church recognizes the death penalty is needed in those circumstances to protect society. Also, even in advanced penal systems there is the terrible problem of prison murders. Prisoners are our neighbors, too, and are entitled to be protected from marauding killers. Finally, in a society where there are 20,000 murders a year, to have executed 1188 people over 34 years, falls clearly within the Pope’s admonition of a rare to practically non-existent application.
An then there are those 50 million+ abortions since 1973.
Also, this development of doctrine is, in the age of the Church, practically brand new, while the teaching on abortion is ancient. Let’s give George Bush et al on capital punishment the same kind of infinite patience this crowd shows to the likes of Ted Kennedy on abortion.
Istm that it’s impossible to consider the question of the death penalty without taking into consideration the requirements of justice. In that regard, from a life-issues point of view, in the search for guiding principles to guide thinking about the death penalty, abortion probably isn’t the right starting point. There is no question of justice involved in abortions, because we all agree that the victim of an abortion is innocent of any wrongdoing.
Questions of just war – another life issue – are probably a better starting point, because those issues also can’t be considered apart from justice.
“Saying something is a matter of prudential judgment is not saying it’s just a matter of opinion. ”
You’re right, of course. It involves understanding the circumstances involved in the particular case, having a coherent moral framework, discerning which moral principles would apply to that particular case and those particular circumstances, and exercising judgment as to how to apply those principles.
If the church taught that, as a matter of principle, the death penalty is instrinsically evil and therefore may never be used under any circumstances, then presumably that is what JPII would have said. He might even have tossed in a “whatsoever” :-). But that isn’t what he said.
Your quote of Fr. Komonchak on the various layers of judgment involved in denying communion to politicians is pertinent. Just because there might conceivably be particular circumstances that justify the death penalty, it doesn’t follow that every execution is justified.
While I oppose the death penalty in virtually all cases, I think this is a cop out. Be honest and say you don’t support it as a matter of policy or morality.
Sean,
Obama says we can disagree without being disagreeable. You agree while being disagreeable! :-P
Eggloff –
The current Church teaching about ajortion is not completely ancient at all. True, the Church has always taught that taking a human life is wrong (while at the same time asserting the justice of some wars – but that’s another problem).
The Church has not taught from ancient times that the embryo is a person from the very beginning of pregnancy. In fact, perhaps the biggest guns of the ancient theologians — Augustine, Anselm and Aquinas — all taught that there is no person present from the early weeks of pregnancy. Please do not obfuscate this issue by claiming that they did. It is clearly false: they did not.
What they also held was that those non-persons have a person’s right to life anyway. For years now I have been asking what their defense of that principle is. In other words, what is their moral justification for that view? So far I haven’t found even one. Do you know what those or any other teacher, including, of course, any popes, gave as the grounds for that view — that a non-person has a person’s right to life?
Until your branch of pro-lifers can come up with a rational defense we of that principle your over-simple argument will continue to fall on deaf ears.
I do not mean to start the whole abortion ebate again in this thread. But please bear my question in mind because I ind because I will be asking it again in the next thread that is about tn morality of abortion
God save us from lawyers. We now have the leading legal lights of this country saying you can’t have a death penalty statute that will pass Constitutional muster even though the document itself clearly contemplates the sanction, while at the same time there is a near absolute Constitutional right to an abortion when the document says nothing about it.
Also, this development of doctrine is, in the age of the Church, practically brand new, while the teaching on abortion is ancient. Let’s give George Bush et al on capital punishment the same kind of infinite patience this crowd shows to the likes of Ted Kennedy on abortion.
Eggloff,
The teaching of the Church on abortion may be ancient, but the teaching on what is appropriate for voters, legislators, and elected officials to do about abortion in an American-style, pluralistic democracy is quite new. You and many others who call yourselves “pro-life” make a very large leap from the moral position that abortion is wrong to a political position about what the law ought to be and how people ought to vote.
As far as I know, the duty of citizens and legislators in a democracy regarding abortion, and the position that capital punishment is almost never justifiable are both “practically brand new,” since they both date to 1995 (in Evangelium Vitae).
The pro-life argument of 2008 in condensed (but not all that condensed) form was, “Abortion was condemned in the Didache, therefore it is a mortal sin to vote for Obama.” Or, “Abortion is an intrinsic evil, therefore you cannot vote for a pro-choice candidate.” In my opinion, the arguments need a lot of work before they deserves to be taken seriously.
Finally, in a society where there are 20,000 murders a year, to have executed 1188 people over 34 years, falls clearly within the Pope’s admonition of a rare to practically non-existent application.
Eggloff,
I would say the key concept John Paul II puts forth, as you yourself explain, is that the only justification for executing someone is if there is no other way to protect society from him or her. Your assertion that “only” 1188 executions in 34 years makes execution in the United States rare to practically non-existent might be defensible if the executions were randomly spread over the entire United States. But one state, Texas, is responsible for over a third of all executions in the United States although it accounts for only about 8 percent of the US population, and three states (Texas, Virginia, and Oklahoma) are responsible for over 50 percent of executions, although together they account for only about 12 percent of the US population. Are we to believe that these three states have prison systems that are so bad they can’t protect the public from convicts?
Yes, David, you are right. The problem of Catholic politicians supporting a right to kill children is fairly new, circa, 1973. The Church has grappled with it in various ways since then and has increasingly taken a harder and harder line as more pastoral approaches have had no effect on the likes of Ted Kennedy et al.
Presumably, the break you give to those like Kennedy on abortion would extend to the governors of Texas, Virginia and Oklahoma on the death penalty.
There was a man, many years ago, who kidnapped, tortured, raped, and murdered a 2- or 3-year old little girl. He utilized, among other things, vice-grip pliers in his torture. The name of the little girl and the thing that perpetrated the crime escape me , as it was decades ago, but please do not talk to me about the thing’s dignity. Dignity! To use the word as a description of this thing is an abomination, and is actually an indication of a seriously warped and perverted mind. And please understand that I mean that to apply to the Pope if he were to call for revocation of the thing’s execution.
Addendum to my post:
The little girl’s name was Amy Sue Seitz, two years old. The thing’s name was Theodore Francis Frank. Frank apparently died in prison. We know how Amy died. I say that Amy had the dignity; Frank was sewer scum, yanked from Satan’s anus.
Monstrous crimes such as the one Bob Schwartz described cry out for justice. Any consideration of the morality of the death penalty needs to keep cases like that one in mind. We need to take seriously the intuition that lifetime imprisonment isn’t sufficient to address the disorder caused by such heinous crimes. This is, after all, why the US reinstated the death penalty after it had been banned for a number of years. The death penalty has always been politically quite popular. What are we to make of that? I don’t think we can dismiss its popularity out of hand.
Yet we also need to consider the astonishing number of death row inmates who have been exonerated as a result of DNA evidence, as well as successful appeals based on police or prosecutor misconduct, incompetent defense attorneys, and so on. In other words, the criminal justice system in the US has demonstrated that it is capable of getting things terribly, terribly wrong.
Then, too, the church’s teaching isn’t US-specific, and in other nations and cultures, prisoners are executed for reasons that strike us as terribly unjust: summary execution of political opponents, “honor killings” of women who dishonor a family in some way, and so on. These situations can’t be considered apart from JPII’s diagnosis of our contemporary culture as being in some sense a “culture of death” – indeed they are instances, along with abortion, euthanasia, and the potential creation and harvesting of clones for medical reasons, of our devaluation of human life.
So where does that leave us? Perhaps where we are now?
We need to take seriously the intuition that lifetime imprisonment isn’t sufficient to address the disorder caused by such heinous crimes.
Jim,
I understand John Paul II’s take on execution is that the only possible justification for it is the protection of society (see my message above of January 4th, 2010 at 11:36 pm). It seems clear and unambiguous to me.
Also, the Catechism says:
The idea of executing someone because he or she commits a particularly heinous crime, and death is seen as the only fitting punishment, is an American idea, not a Catholic idea.
I am not big on the idea of the “dignity of the human person,” but as I understand the Catholic concept, all human persons have dignity by reason of the fact that they are human persons. Executing someone who has committed a heinous crime in the name of justice, or torturing a known terrorist because you know he has important information, are both offenses against human dignity according to the Catholic Church. This seems to be a very difficult teaching for otherwise faithful Catholics to grasp and accept.
It does seem the Church teaching has shifted from allowing capital punishment for retribution to allowing it only for defense of society. This development of doctrine has had a remarkable effect. Many conservative Catholics have become abolitionists because of it. It has moved me along that path also, though not all the way there. I hold what the Church teaches; that it is allowed for defense of society. Still, it gives me the creeps in ways it never did before. This is how Church teachings are supposed to work on supple Catholics.
Hi, David, if you are going to excerpt the relevant portion of the Catechism, you need to include the previous paragraph as well:
“2266 The efforts of the state to curb the spread of behavior harmful to people’s rights and to the basic rules of civil society correspond to the requirement of safeguarding the common good. Legitimate public authority has the right and duty to inflict punishment proportionate to the gravity of the offense. Punishment has the primary aim of redressing the disorder introduced by the offense. When it is willingly accepted by the guilty party, it assumes the value of expiation. Punishment then, in addition to defending public order and protecting people’s safety, has a medicinal purpose: as far as possible, it must contribute to the correction of the guilty party.67 ”
The meaning of 2267 can’t be understood except in the context of 2266.
So, taking the two paragraphs together, aren’t we allowed to ask: do the various strands that make up this teaching cohere seamlessly? Is it the “final word” on the subject, or is it open to further development in some way? Reflecting on it in the light of human reason and experience, does it satsfactorily address all situations?
If we can ask these questions about topics like artificial birth control or homosexuality, surely we can do the same about the death penalty?
Just to be clear: I’m not a supporter of the death penalty. Right now we don’t execute criminals in my state, and I’m more than okay with that. If it were banned again in the US, I wouldn’t have a problem with it.
But I’m not convinced that the church has settled this question once and for all. In fact it seems clear that she has left the door open for further developments.
Jim,
I don’t see any wiggle room in the death penalty statements at all. I see it as the teaching of the Catholic Church that the only reason to execute someone is if there is no other way to protect society. Of course, that’s my own position, so perhaps I am biased.
If we can ask these questions about topics like artificial birth control or homosexuality, surely we can do the same about the death penalty?
Well, I don’t see the need for making every statement about birth control and homosexuality “backward compatible” with what has previously been said. I think some teachings should just be abandoned.
Theodore Francis Frank has dignity by reason of the fact that he is a human person.
Would any of you opponents of the death penalty be willing to say those words to the mother of little Amy Seitz? Would you put your money where your mouth is? I seriously doubt it. To you, its all theoretical, all high-level theology, easy to write about and perhaps vote on in the secrecy of the voting booth, but to have to say this to the grieving mother would require actual courage. More importantly, it would require a heart made of stone.
Hi, Bob,
Believe it or not, I might be willing to have that conversation with her. I would not bring a copy of the Catechism with me to the meeting.
Your comment reminds me that we’re wise to not let victims or their families determine the punishment for convicted criminals.
Jim: Wouldn’t it be more appropriate, more human to sit with her, cry and grieve with her, Pray with her, rather than push your anti-death penalty agenda?
As for your last point, I am of a different mind.
On the contrary, we ought to give them a respectful say in the determination of punishment. If the punishment is intended to address the suffering and anguish of the victims and victims’ families, who better to have a voice?
“Jim: Wouldn’t it be more appropriate, more human to sit with her, cry and grieve with her, Pray with her, rather than push your anti-death penalty agenda?”
Hi, Bob, yes, the sitting/crying/grieving part is really what I had in mind.
For the most part, I’m not an agenda-pusher :-). If the question came up in a conversation with the victim’s mom, though, I need to be prepared to explain the church’s teaching, in a loving way, of course.
I believe victims and victims families do testify at sentencing hearings, at least in Illinois. So they have some input, but the judge does the sentencing. (I’m not sure if juries sentence in Illinois).
Also – I’m not sure if victims’ families are still invited to witness executions, but I’ve always found that to be a troubling practice.