By Man Shall His Blood Be Shed: A Catholic Defense of Capital Punishment by Edward Feser & Joseph Bessette

Author:Edward Feser & Joseph Bessette [Feser, Edward]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Spiritual & Religion
ISBN: 9781681497686
Publisher: Ignatius Press
Published: 2017-07-31T05:00:00+00:00

“Justice to Us Is No Less Than the Death Penalty”

We have devoted considerable space to describing the crimes that led to the execution of forty-three murderers in 2012. Many of the details are highly disturbing and, like the better-known cases of such serial killers as Jeffrey Dahmer, Ted Bundy, and John Wayne Gacy, exhibit a degree of cruelty and depravity that is almost unimaginable. And although some of the other murders and murderers seem relatively tame by comparison, taken together these cases show that offenders ordinarily condemned to death in the United States are typically guilty of crimes that go far beyond simple murder, or they have a history of violent, and even murderous, behavior.

Critics will say that in describing such details we are playing on the reader’s emotions rather than appealing to reason. That is the reverse of the truth. What is required for a dispassionate and rational determination of what would be a proportionate penalty for these offenses is precisely attention to the details. In fact, it is, we would suggest, the opponents of capital punishment who in their neglect of these details are too often guilty of letting themselves be swayed by emotion rather than reason. The danger of ignoring the grisly details of such offenses is that we can be led thereby into a sentimentalized conception of the offenders. We can end up modeling our notion of what a murderer is like on paradigms drawn from pop culture, such as the wise old Morgan Freeman character in the film The Shawshank Redemption—rather than on real-life killers such as David Alan Gore, Robert Brian Waterhouse, and Timothy Shaun Stemple, grubby and sadistic individuals who are impossible to romanticize.

Given what we have argued in previous chapters, and given that the crimes of such individuals go well beyond simple murder (or that the offenders have very serious violent histories), it is clear that nothing less than death would be a proportionate punishment for these crimes and offenders. Thus, unless there are compelling prudential reasons not to employ the death penalty at all, it follows that such offenders ought to be executed, particularly if executing them would also further some of the other ends of punishment, such as deterrence and the protection of society against the offenders. This assumes, of course, that the civil authority fully respects the rights of the accused, that it ascertains guilt through a proper deliberative process, and that it punishes not out of hatred but, as the Catechism of the Catholic Church affirms, to defend the common good. The Catechism calls for “inflict[ing] punishment proportionate to the gravity of the offense”, thereby “redressing the disorder introduced by the offense” (CCC 2266, emphasis added). There is a presumption in favor of proportionate punishment, even if this presumption can be overridden.

We consider below the question of whether considerations about rehabilitation override this presumption in the case of capital punishment, and in the next chapter we consider whether there are yet other prudential considerations that override the presumption.

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