Editorials

...Consequently, the judgment rendered by the community through its competent authorities seeks to "redress the disorder caused by the offense," and only indirectly to relieve the agony of individual victims, no matter how grave that private injury may be...

...Do we have a license...

...Those justly convicted for the mass killing in Oklahoma City deserve the death penalty...

...Those deaths may be a necessary cost of the state washing its hands of direct killing, but it is sentimental to think that outlawing the death penalty will "end the cycle of violence...

...Similarly, it cannot be that the more heinous a crime the more futile our judgment becomes, for that would only immunize the most diabolical criminals by virtue of the enormity of their crimes...

...AN EDITORIAL DISSENT Christ's admonition to turn the other cheek has never been written into law, and for good reason...

...In contrast, the Oklahoma City bombers, acting on their own, nonexistent authority, accomplished exactly what they intended: large-scale carnage...

...The state should end the lives of murderers only for heinous crimes, but it is precisely in those instances that the death penalty alone can express the moral outrage of humanity...

...On its face, the strongest argument made by proponents of the death penalty for murder is that it teaches a profound truth: Human life is sacred, so that anyone who unjustly robs another person of the only life that person has forfeits his or her own right to live...

...The author is an assiduous collector of details and many aspects of the pope's life already familiar in broad outline are given a new piquancy...

...The principal objection to the death penalty is that the state cheapens the value of life if it in turn and in kind becomes an instrument of killing...

...Is it good for us...

...What does it mean...

...Appeals court judges know that fatal mistakes occur...

...and (4) the death penalty is not a rejection of violence but a societal endorsement of violence...

...it must not be too severe, or too lenient...

...It's hard to say No...

...leaving words unsaid, debts of love and honor unpaid and now unpayable...

...Let us not kill...

...because they know it, the costs of administering the death penalty will continue to exceed the costs of enforcing life sentences...

...Death-penalty abolitionists argue that imposing life terms on murderers leaves the state in a morally superior position...

...Our duty as citizens is to seek justice...

...Moral outrage, mediated by the institutions of justice, is the best way to secure the sanctity of life...

...Justice demands we treat criminals as moral agents responsible for their actions, and that we assume such moral responsibility ourselves...

...more basically, this argument if adopted would treat a human being as a pathogen to be eliminated, like the virus for smallpox...

...Another rationale is that a killer who is killed won't kill again...

...None of us would choose to die a death without meaning, victims of a raging assassin obsessed with vengeance directed, not at us, but at an abstraction: The Government, The System...

...In punishing, the law articulates and defends the common good...

...It is also enlightening to discover that this pope, whose supporters ceaselessly repeat that the church is not a democracy, was nevertheless given a crucial send-off on the road to Rome when he was elected by his fellow priests in Cracow to administer the archdiocese after its ordinary died in 1962...

...In short, the state avoids getting blood on its hands...

...That won't bring the murderers' victims back to life...

...The death penalty, then, is a statement of belief in the value of every human person...

...Once those rights are secured, however, the law surely fails in its primary task-namely, to make human community and life possible-if it does not speak forcefully for the dead and for the moral order of things...

...Catholicism has traditionally acknowledged the moral legitimacy of the death penalty, just as it has defended just wars, and for similar reasons...

...But it is wrong...

...Nobody wants to die slowly and in great pain, as some in that building must have: bewildered, blocked from rescue, hope dying with each heartbeat...

...Does holding kidnappers in prison against their will cheapen human dignity by merely mimicking the crime...

...some studies indicate that it may have a reverse effect...

...In that sense, the crime of murder is trivialized if we do not reserve the right to inflict the death penalty in the most grievous cases...

...Further: If these murderers, or one of them, or some of them, are convicted, sentenced to death, and executed, that will be the last step in a long and (presumably) careful public process...

...The death penalty satisfies our urge for closure and, secretly, our desire to avenge...

...Most importantly, the consequence of a murder and of a legal execution is the same: A human life is ended by an act of human will...

...Will it make us safer...

...Do those who plotted and carried out this crime deserve to die...

...If justice means anything, it means that the willful, premeditated murder of the innocent cannot be seen to be tolerated...

...But the logic of this argument fails to come to terms with the inherently retributive nature of justice in criminal cases...

...repentance...

...And it's better to ask: Do we deserve to kill them...

...Neither is it "cost effective...

...How many people realize that, in a triumph of the theatrical (or at least the photogenic) over the ascetic, John Paul II, early in his pontificate, replaced his socialist-issue black-frame glasses with contact lenses...

...To be sure, retribution must not be just a fancy word for revenge...

...What message will it send...

...As C.S...

...Innocent people are killed as a direct consequence of not imposing the death penalty on the guilty...

...Finally: punishment...

...Punishment itself expresses and embodies society's moral judgment, and just punishment must fit the crime...

...More important is Szulc' s research showing that Archbishop Wojtyla, by drafts and documents sent from Cracow and by personal discussion with Pope Paul VI, had a major hand in shaping Humanae vitae...

...But neither will killing the murderers...

...I'm not so sure...

...It's better to say: God knows...

...The living owe the murdered innocent no less-no less than to assume the full burden of judgment and the responsibility for punishment...

...For that reason, murder is regarded as an assault on the moral order and the community as a whole...

...Beyond question, innocent people have been killed by the state in the name of the people (which is to say: Us...

...And now, even more than after the World Trade Center explosion, we live with new and real fears for ourselves and all those around us...

...Taking life to show that life should not be taken doesn't parse...

...Cures or deterrents either work, or they don't...

...reconciliation...

...an eye for an eye, a life for a life...

...If we really want to punish killers, we should let them live with their memories...

...Finally, only the victims have the right to absolve the killer...

...Few of us can escape the pain and grief rising in our minds out of the images of children, one moment peacefully at play, the next crushed and mangled, their bodies and their futures murdered...

...we don't...

...Unjust punishment or unwarranted leniency undermines our sense of fairness, and thereby the common good...

...Killing people you don't know for a cause they've never heard of is an action as senseless as it is evil, as cruel as it is stupid...

...Other arguments fail altogether...

...Convicted killers kill again, either in prison or after they are released...

...It was because of bad intelligence, ignorance, poor planning, and, perhaps, hubris, that the federal agents in Texas brought about a tragedy when their mission and their intention was to prevent one...

...The church has long accepted the retributive aspect of justice, for without it there can be no individual responsibility and therefore no individual freedom...

...PAUL BAUMANN ET CETERA NOW IT CAN BE TOLD Tad Szulc, the veteran journalist, has recently written, John Paul II: The Biography (Scribners...

...With all this firmly and unbearably in mind, the editors still do not think these killers, when fairly tried and properly convicted, should suffer the death penalty...

...That can't be so...

...2) in every case the administration of the death penalty follows upon the exercise of a fallible human judgment...

...I believe that the execution of Nazi war criminals, for example, was meet and just...

...Granted, the differences are significant...

...The Sermon on the Mount enunciates a spiritual ideal, not a theory of jurisprudence...

...So we live also with rage...

...It now appears that, in the minds of the killers, what justified the mass killings in Oklahoma City was the mass killings in Waco, Texas, exactly two years before...

...None of us would ask to die of violence...

...Lewis wrote, only a retributive ethic can make the idea of just or unjust punishment coherent...

...That is why justice must be seen to be done...

...It is the deliberations of the law that effect and legitimize the transference of moral outrage from the individual to the community and in so doing help to vindicate the moral order upon which individual rights depend...

...Justice- moral accountability-involves a different calculus...

...An essential element of justice, and one only the community can perform, is to speak for the victims...

...Civil authority is fallible, often woefully so, but it does not follow that we must be agnostic about our ability to seek or render justice in the here and now...

...Just as we cannot take the law into our own hands, we cannot replace retributive justice with a disproportionate mercy- and disproportion is what Christian mercy is all about...

...What does it say about us...

...All that having been said, it remains true that to respond to killing by killing is not fitting, whether for an individual or the state...

...True, but the risk involved of a killer killing again, while real, can be minimized...

...Only in this way has society tamed the righteous anger of victims and prevented individuals from taking the "law" into their own hands...

...Traditionally, however, God is understood to be the ultimate source of all authority, not an alternative authority who renders moot the judgments of temporal justice...

...Its message is that the sanctity of human life admits exceptions...

...3) the death penalty does not succeed as an instrument of social control, is more costly to society than life imprisonment, is not necessary to the security of the community...

...The Kingdom of God or the church must not be confused with the political community...

...We should hope for metanoia, and make it possible...

...Still, some argue that only God, no human authority, has the right to take human life, even the life of a justly convicted killer...

...Indeed, Catholicism has characteristically held that God's authority must be mediated by human institutions...

...The death penalty is not fairly administered, as amply demonstrated by statistics on race, age, and mental competence of those condemned...

...But no one wants to die without warning, as so many did in the Oklahoma City bombing on April 19: instantly, with no time for a last smile, a final prayer...

...In both cases, a defense of the common good justifies the resort to violence...

...Wojtyla was duly appointed archbishop in 1963, despite the reluctance of the Primate, Cardinal Stefan Wyszynski, but with the tacit approval of the Communist party which thought he'd be an easy man to deal with...

...That duty is not primarily to ourselves, or to the future, but to the dead...

...What took place in Oklahoma City was mass murder, carried out without mercy, with cold disregard for human life, even the lives of little girls and boys, learning early lessons in living and loving in what they and their parents thought was a safe haven...

...The best argument against the death penalty (not necessarily the most persuasive) is that it robs God...

...The next best is that by killing people for killing people we become like unto the killers...

...The great bulk of research says the death penalty does not deter...

...In imposing the death penalty for especially heinous crimes, the law proclaims in unambiguous terms the value society places on innocent life and the absolute revulsion in which we hold such murders...

...One wonders if Karol Wojtyla could have been elected pope if his direct participation in one of the modern church's most divisive decisions had been known- not because the cardinal-electors disagreed (although there were perhaps still some in 1978), but because they might have preferred to let those divisions heal.rred to let those divisions heal...

...It is a just rage...

...That is why the law itself, and the punishment the law demands, does not seek direct compensation for the victims or eventual reconciliation for the criminal, rather it expresses our moral purposes...

...To recap our reasons, and add others: (1) though full justice can never be achieved short of eternity, human-scale justice can be adequately served by means other than the death penalty...

...At some risk, we offer the current instance as example...

...It is the law that enables us to distinguish justice from revenge and capital punishment from murder...

...Neither death-penalty advocates nor opponents can escape with clean hands...

...As Willard Gaylin has written, in our adversarial system the voices and lives of murder victims are quickly forgotten as we direct our attention, necessarily, to the criminal's rights...

...Insuring that punishment is proportionate to the crime is the moral dilemma, not the thin paradox of the state resorting to coercion...