Cheyenne, Wyo., Jan 7, 2020 / 10:01 pm (CNA).- A Wyoming lawmaker intends to introduce a bill to repeal capital punishment in the state when the legislative session begins next month.
Rep. Jared Olsen, R-Cheyenne, said the death penalty does not align with conservative principles.
“I oppose the death penalty because I believe in limited government over life and liberty matters concerning our citizens, fiscal responsibility in how we spend our justice dollars, and because executing our own citizens is immoral and a violation of God’s natural law,” he told CNA.
“If we’re taking a person’s life because we believe that it was unjust for that person to take another’s life, then that seems paradoxical. We ought to be consistent with our morals and our principles. Life is either precious or it’s not.”
In 2019, Olsen sponsored Senate Bill 145, which was defeated 18-12. He announced last week the decision to sponsor a similar bill again this year.
The Republican party holds 50 of the 60 seats in Wyoming’s House of Representatives, and 27 of the 30 Senate seats.
Wyoming has not executed anyone since 1992.
Olsen is working with Conservatives Concerned About the Death Penalty. Introduced to Wyoming in 2017, CCATDP states that small government and the death penalty are not compatible.
“Conservatives have a hard time trusting the government to fix pot holes, to deliver the mail, to decide which businesses to support. Conservatives would rather the government stay out of the business of picking winners and losers in corporations,” Olsen said, according to Oil City News.
“They want the government outside of all these areas in their lives. So why then would we concede that the government should be such an integral part of our justice system? It makes absolutely no sense.”
Kylie Taylor, Coordinator of CCATDP in Wyoming, expressed concern that because the justice system has the potential for error, capital punishment puts innocent people at risk of being executed.
“Since 1973 at least one-hundred and sixty-five inmates have been exonerated. That comes to about one in ten inmates on Death Row that are exonerated and that is huge,” she said, according to Oil City News.
“We know that the system isn’t perfect and that one mistake with a life is one too many,” Taylor further added.
Deacon Mike Leman, the Diocese of Cheyenne’s legislative liaison, told CNA that “For us as a diocese, it’s been about connecting life issues. One of the things I’ve done recently is researching comments from popes in the past and you realize they’ve been for a number of years calling for repeal on the death penalty.”
“It’s important to highlight and connect the life issues because until we do that it’s really hard to highlight for people our responsibility toward any other marginalized population if we turn right around and say, in certain circumstances, life really isn’t an inalienable right.”
He said the Church has emphasized a need for public safety and the responsibility of the government to defend its citizens from dangerous people. However, through the advancement in technology, this does not require the death penalty.
“Pope John Paul II said back in ’99 that through the development of our prison systems and our technology and all of these things, society can protect its citizens.”
He also drew attention to the importance of recognizing the system’s potential for failure and told a story about a man he met who was exonerated from death row.
“I’ve actually met a person who was on death row for 12 years. His father died while he was in prison, his mother, because he was on his last appeal, bought a plot for his grave, and then they found out that the process was completely wrong,” he said.
“When you actually meet someone who has been in that position, it makes you think a little bit more deeply about it.”
The Church has consistently taught that the state has the authority to use the death penalty, in cases of “absolute necessity,” though with the qualification that the Church considered such situations to be extremely rare.
Both Pope Francis and his immediate predecessors have condemned the practice of capital punishment in the West.
St. John Paul II called on Christians to be “unconditionally pro-life” and said that “the dignity of human life must never be taken away, even in the case of someone who has done great evil.” He also spoke of his desire for a consensus to end the death penalty, which he called “cruel and unnecessary.”
And Benedict XVI exhorted world leaders to make “every effort to eliminate the death penalty” and told Catholics that ending capital punishment was an essential part of “conforming penal law both to the human dignity of prisoners and the effective maintenance of public order.”
In August 2018, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith issued a new draft of the catechism’s paragraph regarding capital punishment.
Quoting Pope Francis’ words in a speech of Oct. 11, 2017, the new paragraph states, in part, that “the Church teaches, in the light of the Gospel, that ‘the death penalty is inadmissible because it is an attack on the inviolability and dignity of the person,’ and she works with determination for its abolition worldwide.”
Reasons for changing the teaching, the paragraph says, include: the increasing effectiveness of detention systems, growing understanding of the unchanging dignity of the person, and leaving open the possibility of conversion.
Fr. Thomas Petri, O.P., a moral theologian at the Dominican House of Studies in Washington, D.C., told CNA at the time that he thinks this change “further absolutizes the pastoral conclusion made by John Paul II.”
“Nothing in the new wording of paragraph 2267 suggests the death penalty is intrinsically evil. Indeed, nothing could suggest that because it would contradict the firm teaching of the Church,” Fr. Petri continued.
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OCP’s cover art is usually lame, but that’s the least of their problems.
Should have used fr Martin or Sr semone.. OCP, the wagon wheel disaster for popcorn cafeteria catholicism..
Why apologise for a made up being by a delusional conman like Smith? A cult if there ever was one.
Me thinkest that thou hast misread the article. The apology is made to the Catholic readership BECAUSE of the reasons you state.
But, now that we’re on the subject, it’s fascinating how two very similar religious “types” diverge poles apart from the historically real Incarnation…Mormonism denies the possibility of miracles (all existence is only natural, anthropomorphic, and evolutionary, even God!), while Islam holds that all existence comes miraculously from a totally inscrutable Allah (to affirm even secondary “laws of nature” is to admit an autonomy outside of the only autonomy who is God—and this assertion is blasphemy!).
But, on so many other counts cultic Mormonism and Islam are almost replicas of each other…and almost inevitable to the human imagination—in the absence of Christian witness to the historical Incarnation of Jesus Christ as fully human and fully divine, not a hybrid but both natures fully in one Person. Now, about the similarities:
“Islam attributes a restored text—the Qur’an—to messages received by Mohammed directly from the Angel Gabriel beginning in 610 A.D. The founding prophet of Mormonism is believed to have been visited by the Angel Moroni, instead, beginning in 1823. The prophet Joseph Smith carries an exactly transcribed and untouchable text delivered on hidden tablets of gold. Islam’s untouchable Arabic script (Q 13:37, 42:5, 46:13) is duplicated for Mohammed from an identical text in heaven. Both religions (and many others) have a supplemental set of writings, respectively the Book of Mormon and the Muslim Hadith. Both religious leaders experienced initial persecution, the mystic Joseph Smith in Missouri and Illinois and Mohammed at Mecca. Both migrated to a selected new base of operations, Joseph Smith west to Salt Lake and Mohammed north to Medina. Islam is preached first to the tribes of Arabia, while Mormonism initially saw its mission among the indigenous tribes of North America. Mormons have believed that the American Indians are migrant descendants from the Israelite patriarch Lehi arriving via Arabia to the New World in 590. B.C., but do not reject possibly Asiatic origins [….] Mormonism, like Islam, claims to be a restoration rather than a new religion, and claims an option for ongoing revelation. Mormonism would restore a corrupted Christianity while Islam would restore the earlier and corrupted faith of Abraham [Israelite worship of the Golden Calf, and Christian “polytheism” of the Triune One] from the very beginning of the Judeo-Christian narrative. Mormon apologists refer to a universal apostasy by a Church extinguished under Diocletian and ravaged by later strife among Protestants. Islam is scandalized by early Byzantine Christian theological disputes of about the same period” (extract from Beaulieu, “Beyond Secularism and Jihad: A Triangular Inquiry into the Mosque, the Manger & Modernity,” University Press of America, 2012, Chapter 2).
SUMMARY: Probably not a bad idea to apologize for witlessly using the image of Moroni on the cover of a Catholic publication.