The Pope's unconvincing arguments against the death penalty

By Phil Lawler ( bio - articles - email ) | Mar 23, 2015

Full disclosure: I oppose the use of the death penalty in America today, for prudential reasons that I may explain in another essay. When Pope Francis said execution is always inadmissible, I was not dismayed by his conclusion. But I was dismayed by the logic he used to reach that conclusion.

”For the rule of law, the death penalty represents a failure,” the Holy Father told the International Commission against the Death Penalty. Perhaps so. In an ideal world, all criminals would be fully rehabilitated; they would pay their debts to society and become productive members of society. For that matter, in an ideal world there would be no criminals. But we do not live in an ideal world. Sometimes the system fails, and sometimes criminals remain dangerous to society despite our best efforts to rehabilitate them.

If capital punishment is excluded, then the most dangerous criminals must be kept behind bars indefinitely. Pope Francis argues that the death penalty is unnecessary because the prisoners on Death Row are no longer a threat to society; he says that their “current ability to cause harm is not current, as it has been neutralized—they are already deprived of their liberty.” But that statement is simply inaccurate. Even if we set aside the possibility that an imprisoned killer could escape and terrorize the general population, we should not ignore the threat that a vicious criminal poses to his fellow inmates and to prison guards. Brutal and unrepentant convicts make prison life less humane, and thereby make it more difficult to rehabilitate less serious offenders.

But Pope Francis seems to exclude even the possibility of lifetime sentences, since he says that a life term maybe “considered as a sort of overt death penalty.” Is he contradicting himself here? Or is he proposing that a serial killer must eventually be released?

In making his case against the death penalty, Pope Francis reasons that execution is unnecessary because the killer has already been apprehended, so there is no danger that he will kill again. But here he assumes that capital punishment has no purpose other than protecting society from someone who poses an immediate threat.

Actually the death penalty (or any criminal penalty) has two other important purposes. First it is intended to deter other potential criminals, putting them on notice that they might pay dearly for their offenses. Second it is intended to show the society’s repugnance toward the crime.

To illustrate the latter point, consider a hypothetical case. Imagine a man was justly convicted of a capital crime, but we could somehow know with absolute certainty that he had repented, reformed his life, and would never harm anyone again. Should he then be set free, since he would no longer pose a danger to society? No! Even if he might be a model citizen, he still owes a debt to society that must be paid.

A Catholic priest, in the confessional, can absolve even the most serious sin with only a token penance. But that it because the sinner’s debt has already been discharged, two thousand years ago on Calvary. Secular society cannot take the same attitude without trivializing serious crimes. We may argue about the extent of an offender’s debt, or how it should be repaid. But if we take it for granted that a convicted criminal owes nothing to society, that is a failure of the rule of law.

Pope Francis claims:

With the application of the death penalty, the convict is denied the possibility to repent or make amends for the harm caused; the possibility of confession, by which a man expresses his inner conversion, and contrition, the gateway to atonement and expiation, to reach an encounter with God's merciful and healing justice.

Here again the Pope’s statement seems clearly to be factually incorrect. A convict who is scheduled for execution has both the opportunity and the incentive to set his life in order, to make a good confession, to prepare himself for a final judgment. One could argue that by forcing him to focus on his imminent death, the state gives the convict a rare incentive for repentance. St. Thomas Aquinas made roughly that argument in favor of capital punishment, in direct opposition to the Pope’s argument.

In perhaps the most troubling passage of his March 20 address, Pope Francis said: “States kill when they apply the death penalty, when they send their people to war or when they carry out extrajudicial or summary executions.” Here three completely different sorts of government action are tossed together in an illogical jumble.

And the Pope compounds the problem by going on to say that governments “can also kill by omission, when they fail to guarantee to their people access to the bare essentials for life.” Is he seriously suggesting that the government of a poor country, by failing to stop a famine, is as guilty of “killing” its citizens as a government like the military dictatorship in his native Argentina, which kidnapped citizens by night and executed them without trial?

We can all agree, I hope, that extrajudicial executions—lynchings—are morally indefensible. Perhaps Pope Francis had in mind the brutal mass murders of the Islamic State when he conceded that governments do sometimes have the right, and even the duty, “to repel an ongoing assault proportionately to avoid damage caused by the aggressor, and the need to neutralize him could lead to his elimination.” So making war can sometimes be right, whereas summary executions can never be right, and capital punishment is the topic under discussion. To toss the three things together in a sentence can only produce confusion.

Pope Francis has developed a reputation for making offhand remarks that sometimes cause consternation among the faithful. But his message to the International Commission against the Death Penalty was apparently not delivered extemporaneously; the Vatican announced that the Pope had given a “letter” to the group’s leader. It is distressing that a prepared statement by the Roman Pontiff—which would inevitably be interpreted, rightly or wrongly, as an expression of the teaching magisterium—would make such unconvincing arguments.