People v. State

In a comment to my post criticizing Scalia’s religious justification for the death penalty, a gentleman named Dudley Sharp posted links to a series of intelligent articles he’s written on the death penalty. Of particular note is the article titled The Death Penalty: Neither Hatred nor Revenge and the article titled Sister Helen Prejean & the death penalty: A Critical Review. Sharp’s observations in the latter article about the events depicted in the movie Dead Man Walking are similar to observations I myself have made. I’ve previously expressed ambivalence about the death penalty rather than a (more…)

Thus wrote Scalia in an article titled “God’s Justice and Ours” published in First Things in 2002, which I came across via these two recent posts on Catholic judges at Mirror of Justice. He goes on to explain:

In my
view, the major impetus behind modern aversion to the death penalty is the equation
of private morality with governmental morality. This is a predictable (though
I believe erroneous and regrettable) reaction to modern, democratic self–government.
(more…)

There is a compelling logic to the pro-life position, and so it would seem to the thinking that led Scott Roeder to kill George Tiller, M.D.:

Everyone recognizes that it is murder to kill a one-day-old baby. But there’s no material difference between a one-day old baby and a fetus one-day before its due date. It’s nonsensical to think that the mere act of being born and breathing the air makes the one-day-old a “person” with legally-cognizable rights in a way that the about-to-be-born fetus is not. The one-day-old is completely clueless. He sleeps and sometimes cries, and doesn’t open his eyes much. His life could be snuffed out without him really knowing what he’ll be missing, without the fear and anguish of loss that (more…)

The other day I randomly was thumbing through a collection of C.S. Lewis’ spiritual works and unexpectedly came across this passage from The Problem of Pain:

Some enlightened people would like to banish all conceptions of retribution or desert from their theory of punishment and place its value wholly in the deterrence of others or the reform of the criminal himself. They do not see that by so doing they render all punishment unjust. What can be more immoral than to inflict suffering on me for the sake of deterring others if I do not deserve it? And if I do deserve it, you are admitting the claims of ‘retribution.’ And what can be more outrageous than to catch me and (more…)

Mark Bennett at Defending People recently opined, in a post about Iraqi tribal leaders’ negative reaction to an American soldier being spared the death penalty by an American jury for raping and murdering a 14-year-old Iraqi girl and murdering her family: “People’s basest instincts – retribution, to name one at play here – are the same the world over. That the American criminal justice system is better than many is not attributable to the character of our government officials, but rather to the principles that constrain them.”

I commented: (more…)