Death Penalty News

The leader of the world’s 2nd largest Christian denomination has joined with the Roman Catholic Church in declaring the death penalty fundamentally incompatible with Christian teachings.  In an interview with Vatican News on October 20, 2020, Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew of Constantinople, the head of the Eastern Orthodox Church, called opposition to the death penalty “the logical and moral consequence” of adherence to Christian principles of human dignity. The Orthodox patriarch’s comments came during a visit to Rome for a prayer meeting for peace with Pope Francis. Asked for his views on the Roman Catholic pontiff’s recently papal encyclical, Fratelli Tutti: on Fraternity and Social Friendship , Patriarch Bartholomew praised the pope’s writings, saying “We completely agree with the call-challenge of His Holiness to abandon the indifference or even cynicism that governs our ecological, political, economic and social life in general.”  The patriarch called on all people to...

If confirmed, she may soon have to reconcile her Catholic morality and the law over a death penalty case. After 2 decades on death row, Ruben Gutierrez’s time nearly came this summer. A little over an hour before he was due to be killed in the execution chamber housed in Texas’ Huntsville Unit, a reprieve arrived from an unlikely source: Justice Samuel Alito. For years, Mr. Gutierrez has maintained that he did not murder Escolastica Harrison, an 85-year-old widow and trailer park owner he and an accomplice robbed in 1998, though he confessed to being present at the woman’s residence during the botched burglary in which Ms. Harrison was stabbed and beaten to death. But the question of his guilt was not what led to the temporary stay of execution. Instead, Mr. Gutierrez was granted a little more time on earth so that the courts could decide whether his religious liberty had been unduly infringed on by a 2019 state regulation banning clergy in the execution chamber. Mr. Gutierrez, a Catho...

What historical literature can tell us about the cruelty of the death penalty Enlightenment thinker Cesare Boccaria wrote about the problems of state executions in “On Crime and Punishment” in 1764. It can take your money, steal your time, send you to war, but, my god, don’t let it kill you. We Americans are in a strange position of building highways, national parks, middle schools and electric chairs. The United States currently has 2,000 inmates on death row, which ought to prompt a moral emergency on the basis of repudiating human sacrifice and oppressive state power. The history of capital punishment is not confined to the vibrating bolt; gas chambers were introduced in the States in 1924 as a humane method of execution compared to hangings. Murdering prisoners is woven into American history. However, if the United States would have indulged WWI poet Wilfred Owen’s “ Dulce et Decorum Est ,” where he describes his comrades as drowning “under a green sea,” while fumbling to fasten o...

Pope Francis’ new encyclical, “Fratelli Tutti,” does something that some Catholics believed could not be done: It ratifies a change in church teaching. In this case, on the death penalty. In 2018, Pope Francis ordered a change in the Catechism of the Catholic Church, the official compendium of church teaching, when he termed the death penalty “inadmissible.” Today the pope placed the full weight of his teaching authority behind this statement: The death penalty is inadmissible, and Catholics should work for its abolition. A papal encyclical is one of the highest of all documents in terms of its authority, removing any lingering doubt about the church’s belief. “There can be no stepping back from this position,” says Francis, referring to the opposition to capital punishment expressed by St. John Paul II. “Today we state clearly that ‘the death penalty is inadmissible’ and the Church is firmly committed to calling for its abolition worldwide.” Helen Prejean, C.S.J., author of Dead Man ...