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Why We Need to Save the Death Penalty and Two Suggestions as to How
Pope Francis’s visit to the United States brought a tide of stories not directly associated with his address to Congress, but one matter he did discuss — and subsequently followed-up on — seems to have slipped past with little discussion. To wit, Francis found time between his surreptitious visit with Kim Davis and various other activities to have a curious letter be written on his behalf to a Georgia parole board requesting clemency to one Kelly Gissendaner, who had been sentenced to death for her involvement with the murder of her husband in 1997 by her lover. Regardless, Gissendaner was executed on Wednesday after various appeals were denied.
The pope’s position on the death penalty is, at the very minimum, consistent with his position on abortion. But foolish consistency can be the hobgoblin of small minds. It’s one thing to be consistent, but it’s another thing entirely to be morally consistent. That’s where my position on the death penalty comes in. It seems appropriate to draw distinctions between the taking of innocent versus guilty life.
Our system of criminal justice — and, thus, our use of the death penalty — is based upon retributive justice. This is distinct from “revenge,” which has a connotation of arbitrariness, disproportion, and emotionality. Under retributive justice, we punish wrongdoers in a fashion meant to be in proportion to their offense. In the case of property crime, offenders will frequently be imprisoned for some period of time in proportion to the severity of the damage suffered by their victims and, in some cases, face a financial penalty. In the case of murder, it should be obvious that nothing could replace that which was taken. What financial sum could replace a life? What term in prison could serve as just retribution equal to another person’s value to society? The answer, of course, is none but we attempt to do so by imprisoning people for the remainder of their natural life without the possibility of parole.
Let us suppose that a rich man — a very, very rich man, such as, for example, Jack Ma, who possesses a net worth of some $20 billion — makes a straightforward proposition to the Vatican.
An email from a friend:
Toward the end of last week, a Jewish friend asked me what I thought of Pope Francis’s performance on his North American tour. I hesitated to answer. What I wanted to say was that he’s driving me crazy. “I’m conflicted,” was the best I could come up with.
According to a comprehensive Pew poll, since Francis became the supreme pontiff, the number of Catholics in this country has remained unchanged, the rate at which Catholics attend mass has remained unchanged, and the rates at which Catholics go to confession or participate in volunteer activities in their churches and communities has remained … unchanged.
In the most literal sense, the Industrial Revolution was dirty business. Never before in our planet’s history had man done as much damage to the land, the air, and the waters as when we first acquired powered machines. In search of energy, forests were torn down, peat bogs were ripped up, and coal was extracted and burned in ways that we’d find repulsive today.
Pope Francis has arrived in America. Good for him and hooray for the American Catholic Church. It’s always nice to hear a good news. Living in Ireland, where the Roman Catholic church has been turned into the proverbial boogeyman once reserved for my English cousins — with falling priest numbers and even fewer congregations — I am always happy to see a positive story about the Catholic Church, no matter the occasion. Let us hope it leads to a boom in vocations in the American homeland, and perhaps a trickle here in Ireland, too.
The pope is spending four days in a country whose Communist dictatorship has remained unrelenting in its repression of free speech, political dissent and other human rights despite a warming of relations with the Vatican and the United States. Yet by the end of his third day, the pope had said or done absolutely nothing that might discomfit his official hosts.
TO THOSE WHO WERE ROBBED OF LIFE: the unborn, the weak, the sick, the old, during the dark ages of madness, selfishness, lust and greed for which the last decades of the twentieth century are remembered….” C. Everett Koop, MD
