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The death penalty – a replay of “deadly logic”The headline “America and the death penalty” heralded an extensive editorial published in the Sunday Chicago Tribune on June 10, 2001. In a balanced and carefully reasoned opinion the editors analyzed the execution of Timothy McVeigh. While noting the problematic aspects of the legal process of death penalty cases in general, the editors of the Tribune methodically dismantle such objections in the McVeigh case. The editorial’s argument is dispassionate: “Executing Timothy McVeigh, then, becomes a simple matter of justice.” The Tribune’s position advocates neither deterrence nor vengeance. The bottom line of the issue is “punishment, plain and simple.” Although the editorial reflects no tentativeness about the McVeigh execution, it appears to situate on it within a narrow range of application. The McVeigh execution meets the cannons of “a justifiable response to a small number of extraordinarily vicious crimes.” “America and the death penalty” discloses the catalytic nature of the McVeigh execution in the national debate about capital punishment. Diana Penner, a writer for the Indianapolis Star, viewed this case as reducing that debate to its ultimate implication – “Is the death penalty right or wrong?” Without a doubt, the contemporary pastoral teaching of the Catholic Church does not agree with the judgment that supports the justice of imposing the death penalty. Some theological commentators notice a shift in the state of the question in the revised Catechism of the Catholic Church (1997). If their premise is correct, the Catechism’s reference to the death penalty was deleted from the section on the justification on punishment (n.2266) and restricted to the question of necessary societal defense of human life against unjust attack (n.2267). The change may be subtle but it is not insignificant in revisionary approaches to the ethics of capital punishment. Professor E. Christian Brugger of Loyola University in New Orleans has developed a tentative revision of the typical grounds justifying the imposition of the death penalty. In line with this rationale, punishment addresses crime already perpetrated. By contrast, self-defense entailing justified killing responds to “a crime in progress or being contemplated.” Father James F. Keenan, a Jesuit moral theologian, makes a similar point. The traditional grounds for killing in legitimate self-defense were founded on threat to or the need for rescue of innocent persons. In The Gospel of Life (1995) Pope John Paul II developed a distinction which contributed to the revision of the sections on the death penalty in the 1993 edition of the Catechism of the Catholic Church. The encyclical stated that punishment “ought not go to extreme of executing the offender except in cases of absolute necessity.” (n.56) The Holy Father judged that developments in modern penal systems make such instances “very rare, if not practically non-existent.” Father John P Langan, S.J., judges Pope John Paul II’s approach in The Gospel of Life to be more empirical and historical in character, not a developed philosophical or theological thesis as such. Yet it has opened fresh grounds for the theological discussion of the death penalty. In the light of this rethinking, provisional questions are being raised about the meaning of intentional killing and the grounding of the inviolability of all human life, not in innocence or guilt but in its intrinsic worth and dignity. When a convicted criminal is no longer a threat, can the death penalty satisfy the norms of just punishment? At this time a fair reading of The Gospel of Life and the Catechism does not find an explicit rejection of the death penalty in principle. With that proviso, however, there are solid indicators that theological analysis is moving beyond a lack of justification for imposing a death penalty to a reinterpretation of the principle itself. Writing in his Ethics Notebook (America June 4-11), Father John F. Kavanaugh drew an insightful paradox out of the execution of Timothy McVeigh. In Kavanaugh’s opinion, Timothy McVeigh’s thinking was misguided. McVeigh was deluded by an imperative dictating killing in order to erase evil. If the moral principle negating any acceptable reason to kill were operative, another scenario might have unfolded. In fact, McVeigh’s unconscionable crime would have been unthinkable. According to Father Kavanaugh, society and public authority play out the same twisted logic – “cold-blooded, rationally justified, premeditated killing for a good cause.” In doing so, the Jesuit philosopher from St. Louis University contends, “(W)e succumb to the delusion that we prove the sacredness of human life by snuffing out another life.” The stark reality of the execution is a replay of the “deadly liturgy” that Timothy McVeigh convened. In the end, the nation confirms McVeigh’s “deadly logic.”
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