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Thursday, October 20, 2005

The Death Penalty
One of our best and brightest bishops speaks: Archbishop Chaput clarifies Church’s stance on death penalty, says in industrialized societies, it must end.

The Archbishop's own words:
    Catholic teaching on euthanasia, the death penalty, war, genocide and abortion... are rooted in the same concern for the sanctity of the human person. But these different issues do not all have the same gravity or moral content. They are not equivalent....

    In the wake of the bloodiest century in history... the Church invites us to recover our own humanity by choosing God’s higher road of restraint and mercy instead of state-sanctioned killing that implicates all of us as citizens.
The Archbishop is correct that the death penalty "implicates all of us as citizens." For that reason, all executions should be public.

I agree with The Christian Liberty Party's proposed stance on this issue:
    Whereas the nation has a duty to protect the families within its borders from internal assault, the right of every nation to impose just penalties upon criminals, including the death penalty, cannot be denied. However, justice likewise demands that the death penalty only be imposed when all other avenues for maintaining the security of the nation’s inhabitants are clearly inadequate and the identity of the criminal can be established with certainty. While progress has been made in assuring the certain identity of dangerous criminals, the necessary certainty is not in all cases achieved. Furthermore, given the resources of American society, life-long imprisonment in solitary confinement is, in almost all cases, sufficient to sequester the danger to the family that dangerous, unrepentant criminals represent. As a result, the death penalty in America is to be used with extreme infrequency, if at all.
The idea of "life-long imprisonment in solitary confinement" coupled with forced labor sounds good to me.