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What the Guilty Taught Me, and What I Still Cannot Say

What the Guilty Taught Me, and What I Still Cannot Say

Last updated on: October 19, 2026 at 9:27 am by Dennis Knapp

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What the Guilty Taught Me, and What I Still Cannot Say 2026-10-19T09:27:54-06:00 Dennis Knapp

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Guest writer: Pilgrim.

A Pilgrim at the Prison Table.

Then the Lord put a mark on Cain, so that no one who came upon him would kill him. (Genesis 4:15)

Prologue: An Instinct and a Teaching

For as long as I can remember, I have been unable to make peace with executions. I did not reason my way there. It was an instinct, felt in my stomach before my mind found the words, and for years I distrusted it, because the Church seemed to say otherwise.

My father distrusted my instinct too, in his own way. He was a rabbi’s son who became a Catholic, and he knew Jewish teaching well. We had long discussions about the death penalty over the years, and he cautioned me not to let my heart rule my head. I have not forgotten that.

Britain’s last hanging was in 1964, and abolition for murder followed in 1965. My father thought the penalty should remain available for the most egregious crimes, and for those who could never safely be released from prison. He pointed to Nuremberg.

His tradition had argued about it long before either of us. In Mishnah, Makkot 1:10, a court that executed someone once in seven years was called destructive. Rabbi Tarfon and Rabbi Akiva said that, had they sat on the Sanhedrin, no one would ever have been executed, and Rabban Shimon ben Gamliel answered that they would multiply the shedders of blood. It settled nothing for the Christian question, but it showed me that my father’s view and my own instinct belonged to a much older conversation.

The Church had good authority for her teachings. Genesis 9:6 says that whoever sheds human blood will have his own blood shed, because humanity bears the image of God. Saint Paul says the ruler “does not bear the sword in vain” (Romans 13:4). Aquinas defended the state’s right to execute grave offenders for the common good. Popes governed lands where the scaffold stood. So, I told myself the Church knew something I did not, and for a long time I left it there.

I am writing now because the scheduled execution of Nidal Hasan on 3 December 2026 has brought the question into public view. It is an older question for me. It began in childhood and sharpened when I started meeting men who had done terrible things.

I have worked with child abusers, rapists and murderers throughout my career in public service, and I also visited prisoners as a member of the Society of St Vincent de Paul in Scotland.

My Brother Who Shot Me

On 13 May 1981, Mehmet Ali Ağca shot Pope John Paul II in St Peter’s Square. Four days later, from his hospital bed, the Pope asked people to pray for “my brother”, whom he had “sincerely forgiven”.

On 27 December 1983, John Paul went to Rebibbia prison in Rome and met Ağca in private.

The forgiveness did not erase the crime. Ağca stayed in prison until 2000, when Italian President Carlo Azeglio Ciampi pardoned him. The Vatican later said that John Paul had asked the Italian authorities for clemency and repeated the request shortly before the pardon (Vatican statement, 13 June 2000).

Something in me that had been wrestling for years became quieter. His forgiveness came before any sign that Ağca had repented, and his visit showed it had not been withdrawn. Institutions wait for evidence of sorrow. John Paul did not. It was a man’s forgiveness, not a magistrate’s, and I could not yet explain how the one squared with Genesis 9 or Romans 13. But it showed me that even the gravest crime need not exhaust our understanding of the person who committed it.

The Men Across the Table

Over the years, through the probation service and as a lay visitor, I sat across tables from many people who had done terrible things. They were of several kinds.

Much of the talking happened over cigarettes and prison-canteen drinks. I would buy a man a drink because it is hard to talk across a table to someone with nothing in front of him. It was a small thing, and it mattered to some of them more than I expected. I watched their eyes and faces as closely as I listened to their words, and neither told me what I most wanted to know.

We talked about life inside, how the days went, how they got through them, and about their families. More than one man told me his family had disowned him. They said it flatly, asking for nothing. I rarely knew what to say, and I doubt I said anything useful. I came to see that a sentence is more than the years the court names, and that being disowned is part of it.

Some were sorry in a way that seemed real to me. They were often the ones who neither expected parole nor demanded it, which may mean their sorrow was real, or may mean they had stopped performing for an audience that was no longer listening. I cannot tell which. The ones I believed seemed to understand that what had been done could not be undone, and that something was owed.

I often think of the penitent thief. “We have been condemned justly,” he says, “for we are getting what we deserve for our deeds” (Luke 23:41). He does not ask to come down from the cross. He asks to be remembered, and he is told, “Today you will be with me in Paradise” (Luke 23:43). Repentance did not cancel his sentence. It meant the sentence was not God’s last word.

Others, hoping for parole, meant saying they were sorry, as accepting responsibility was a condition of release. They knew what to say. Where release depends on being seen to be sorry, sorrow becomes something to perform. No institution has a window into the heart: “the Lord does not see as mortals see; they look on the outward appearance, but the Lord looks on the heart” (1 Samuel 16:7).

Some denied everything. Some could not be reached at all. A few enjoyed telling me what they had done, reliving their crimes. I remember their eyes lighting up, as though I had been let in on something. I felt revulsion. It was hard to sit across from a man who took pleasure in what had destroyed other people, and harder to admit that he was still a man.

When I started in the probation service, a wise mentor, a Methodist minister, warned me I would meet men with no conscience, and that I must protect myself. I have been grateful for those words ever since. They kept me careful without making me hard.

One man I met as a lay visitor was a danger to children and would remain one. He could also manipulate me. As a father of young children, I felt anger at what he had done and fear of what he might do again. I would be lying if I said that was all of it. Part of me, as a father, simply wanted him gone. I would not have trusted him near my children, or wanted anyone else to trust him near theirs. He was exactly the case my father had in mind, and I could not tell my father he was wrong.

I once asked a priest what we do with men like that, the ones diagnosed as psychopaths, the ones capable of playing us. He did not offer a technique. He said, “We love them, will their good, for the men they could be, not the men shaped by genes or life experiences.”

That answer has stayed with me. It did not ask me to trust, or to help them achieve liberty. It asked me to go on seeing a man who might have been otherwise, and to refuse to let what shaped him decide who he is. Only God knows where full freedom ends and compulsion begins.

My experience taught me that some people must never again be allowed their freedom, because the people they threaten are owed their safety. It did not teach me that they must therefore be killed.

The Mark on Cain

God’s answer to the first murder is strange. Cain kills his brother, and God does not kill Cain. He puts a mark on him so that no one else will (Genesis 4:15). John Paul II understood it this way in Evangelium Vitae: “Not even a murderer loses his personal dignity, and God himself pledges to guarantee this”.

Cain is cursed from the ground and made a fugitive and a wanderer. The mark is a refusal to let anyone else decide that his life no longer counts.

Dignitas Infinita draws a distinction I found clarifying between “the moral dignity that de facto can be ‘lost’ and the ontological dignity that can never be annulled”. The people across my table differed enormously in the first. I never found any difference between them in the second. The man whose eyes lit up when he told me what he had done was the hardest test of that sentence. I did not like what I saw in him. I could not honestly say that he had stopped being a man.

Dignity is not an attribute I observe or judge in a person. It is a quality I am told about him by the One who made him in His image and likeness. Guilt alone does not put another person’s life at our disposal.

When Justice Becomes Spectacle

The mark of Cain says what the offender keeps. It does not say what the state may do, and that is harder. Guilt matters. The Catechism of the Catholic Church says that “the primary scope of the penalty is to redress the disorder caused by the offence” (2266), and the men who accepted responsibility understood that. Revenge is another thing. Scripture will not let it wear the clothes of justice: “never avenge yourselves… for it is written, ‘Vengeance is mine, I will repay’” (Romans 12:19). Yet, Paul also speaks of the ruler who bears the sword.

Which brings me back to Nidal Hasan, who was convicted of killing thirteen people at Fort Hood in 2009 and is to be shot by firing squad. The plan to broadcast the execution shocked me, and on 15 October the President announced that it would not go ahead. The crime and the victims are real, and so is the need for justice. None of that requires us to put his death on show.

In September 2025, Pope Leo XIV said in reply to reporters, “Someone who says ‘I’m against abortion but says I am in favour of the death penalty’ is not really pro-life,” and that Church teaching on this is “very clear.” Archbishop Timothy Broglio, who has pastoral responsibility for Catholics in the US armed forces, went further. In his statement, he said that, as he would in the case of a procured abortion, he would oblige any Catholic assigned to the firing squad to ask to be excused, as the action is “contrary to the teaching of the Church.” A Catholic soldier could once carry out such an order lawfully and morally. Now he must ask to be excused. I do not know how the Church explains that.

The Question I Cannot Answer

If my father were alive today, we would both be discussing the confused teaching of the Catholic Church. Is the new teaching a prudential judgement about present circumstances? If not, what has the Church come to understand about human dignity that she did not understand before? And how does the answer fit the centuries in which the Church accepted execution and defended it as just punishment?

He would no doubt remark, wryly, that rabbinic Judaism enjoys endlessly debating these things and forms separate schools under different rabbis. That is not the Church’s model, although sometimes it feels like it.

I cannot answer these questions. The Church now calls the death penalty “inadmissible because it is an attack on the inviolability and dignity of the person” (2267). I do not know what changed, and I have not seen it explained. The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith’s accompanying letter points to two things: a growing awareness that dignity survives grave crimes, and more effective detention. Dignitas Infinita later said the penalty violates dignity “regardless of the circumstances”. If it is better prisons, I do not see what dignity has changed. If it is dignity, I do not see why it forbids now what it once allowed. John Paul II, who forgave Ağca, still allowed execution in cases of “absolute necessity”, though he called them “very rare, if not practically non-existent” (56).

The letter calls the new teaching an authentic development “not in contradiction with the prior teachings of the Magisterium”. A development is credible when we can see how the new grows out of the old. Where the account is missing, some will see a contradiction, and I understand why. I can live with the silence, trusting that an explanation may come. Others cannot, and I do not think they should be told to. I would rather the Church said what she means than leave her children to guess. She asks religious submission of mind and will even to papal teaching that is not infallible (Lumen Gentium 25). I take that seriously, and I ask these questions as a son.

What “Redemption” Means

Another word that puzzles me is “redemption”. The Catechism says detention should not “definitively deprive the guilty of the possibility of redemption”. Francis spoke in 2017 of “moral and existential redemption”. He had already said in 2014 that life sentences are “just a death penalty in disguise”, and in 2018 he explained that they “take away the possibility of the moral and existential redemption of the person sentenced”. Fratelli Tutti calls them “a secret death penalty”.

What does redemption mean here? If it means a change of heart, I met men inside who seemed to find it, and a locked door did not stop them. God has “no pleasure in the death of the wicked, but that the wicked turn from their ways and live” (Ezekiel 33:11). The penitent thief was executed and promised Paradise, so I cannot say the scaffold closes heaven. What a state may end is a man’s time to repent and make amends. I believe that matters. I do not see that it settles the question.

If redemption means a life outside, then prison, the alternative that John Paul II and the 1997 Catechism offered to execution, is itself under suspicion, and the argument against execution may have undermined the thing it asked us to put in its place. And if the state could once take a life as a fitting answer to grave crime, it is hard to see why it cannot take a man’s liberty for life. I do not say Francis was wrong. I say that no document explains how his remark fits what earlier popes taught. The Catechism does not mention life imprisonment, and the remark lives in speeches and a single sentence of an encyclical. I do not know what weight it carries.

A Just Sentence

My father’s answer to the worst cases was plain: the penalty should be there for the man who committed the most heinous crime or could never safely be released. I could not give that answer, and I could not say what the Church says should take its place.

If Pope Francis meant mandatory life sentences with no possibility of parole, he has a point: a man told at the outset that nothing he does will ever matter has nothing to work toward. I do not know which he meant, and most life sentences are not like that. In England and Wales, a court sets a minimum term, and release after this depends on the Parole Board being satisfied that detention is no longer needed to protect the public. It leaves whole-life orders, for the few who will never be safe to release, exactly where they were.

In practice, a minimum term can be a life sentence. I once visited a man convicted of a murder and rape committed thirty-five years earlier. Familial DNA had found him. He was in his sixties, with a minimum term of twenty-five years. He had lived without crime before and since. Was it wrong? I could not say it was. Nothing in his later life redressed what he had done, and his victim’s family had waited as long as he had been free. But was it right? If redemption means a change of life, he had found it without the state’s help, and the sentence neither gave it nor could take it away.

At the other extreme was a man I could not in conscience see released. If execution offends his dignity and a life sentence takes away his redemption, I do not know what the Church would have us do with him. My father had an answer for that man. I have only the Church’s refusal of it, and no clear account of what she would put in its place.

My work taught me to be wary of any judgement that treats a life as exhausted by its worst act. It also left me unable to see how a state, whose courts and parole boards cannot look into a heart, can know that a man has nothing left to become. My father warned me not to let my heart rule my head. I have tried to heed him.

Epilogue: Where Mercy and Justice Meet

I still oppose executions. I still cannot say how the Church’s prohibition follows from what she held before. Are both true? For now, I can live in that place, as a pilgrim lives at a wayside inn: grateful for it, and not mistaking it for the end of the road. “Steadfast love and faithfulness will meet; righteousness and peace will kiss each other” (Psalm 85:10). I do not read the verse as telling me to give up mercy or justice. I read it as saying that in God they are not rivals.

So, I pray for the thirteen who died at Fort Hood, and for those who loved them. I pray for the soldiers who may be asked to serve on a firing squad. I pray for Nidal Hasan, whom I will never meet and cannot see into, and for the people across the table whom I could not reach.

The mark of Cain is still there, on every man across every table. Pray that we do not decide it was never meant for him.

Thank you!

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