What about being “personally opposed” to the death penalty?

Last updated on: July 26, 2016 at 10:01 pm by Jane the Actuary

What about being “personally opposed” to the death penalty? 2016-07-26T22:01:34-06:00 Jane the Actuary

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from pixabay, https://pixabay.com/en/sling-hangman-hanging-knot-1222466/

So lots of people are upset that Tim Kaine is a professing Catholic who has a 100% abortion-rights voting record. Nothing new under the sun, really, though.

What I am more interested in, however, is the pairing of “personal opposition” to abortion, and to the death penalty, for instance in a campaign ad from his 2005 gubernatorial campaign, as linked to by Ann Althouse.

And that’s interesting to think about. We’re quite used to the claims of being “personally opposed” when it comes to abortion, as a way of trying to square the circle, and profess to be faithful to both Catholic doctrine and Democratic Party doctrine.

But can you be personally opposed to the death penalty, and still sign death warrants as governor? Our second-most-recent criminal governor (literally a convicted criminal), George Ryan, decided that the answer was “no,” and instituted a moratorium on the death penalty and then commuted the sentences of all those on death row before he left office — and he was not a stereotypical bleeding-heart liberal but simply announced that he believed that the risk of executing a guilty man was not one he wanted to take. (Unlike Blago, he was not indicted until after he left office.)

Of course, Ryan didn’t campaign with a position on the death penalty one way or the other, and he never had the need, as Kaine believed he did, to assure voters he’d enforce the death penalty, in order to win an election with voters skeptical of his politics.

Now, if you’re “personally opposed” to the death penalty insofar as you believe there’s a risk of executing an innocent man, then you could always rationalize that, as governor, you’d make extra sure that you’d only accept the death penalty for those for whom there was complete certainty of guilt, and no mitigating factors to consider.

But if you believe that the death penalty is inherently wrong, that the state should never be in the business of executing criminals, no matter what, well, then I just don’t see how you can accept signing a death warrant. Do you tell yourself, “the executions would happen regardless of who was governor; at least I can do what I can to lessen the risk of a wrong execution, or to ensure the execution is humane”? Do you tell yourself that you would implement all manner of programs that benefit the poor and needy, so if you have to sign a few death warrants, that’s a small price to pay?

Me, I know that Catholic doctrine is that the death penalty should only be used as a “last resort,” and that in one of his encyclicals, JPII wrote that in modern Western nations, the conditions under which the death penalty was acceptable simply didn’t exist, because we have the ability to imprison criminals for life, instead. At the same time, I can’t get myself to care all that much — these are criminals, after all, guilty of heinous crimes.

But if you are a true opponent of the death penalty, if you believe it’s morally wrong, seems to me you violate those moral principles in signing that death warrant, and announce that your opposition isn’t so, well, oppositional, anyway.

image from pixabay, https://pixabay.com/en/sling-hangman-hanging-knot-1222466/

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