Archbishop Christophe Pierre addresses the 2020 USCCB Fall General Assembly.
Washington, D.C. Newsroom, Oct 2, 2021 / 11:19 am (CNA).
The Apostolic Nuncio to the United States, Archbishop Christopher Pierre, asked the governor of Missouri on Mon… […]
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The lethal injection room at California’s San Quentin State Prison. / California Department of Corrections via Wikimedia (CC BY 2.0)
Washington D.C., Jul 21, 2021 / 18:02 pm (CNA).
One recent survey shows a majority of U.S. Catholics supporting use of the death penalty for murder convicts. The poll numbers follow a 2018 update to the Catechism that the death penalty is “inadmissible.”
According to a survey of 5,109 U.S. adults by the Pew Research Center, conducted from April 5 to 11, 2021 and published in June, a majority of U.S. Catholics either “strongly” or “somewhat” support use of the death penalty for murder convicts.
Mirroring the responses of U.S. adults overall, 31% of Catholics “somewhat” favor the death penalty for those convicted of murder, while 27% of Catholics “strongly” favor it.
In comparison, 32% of U.S. adults “somewhat” favor the death penalty in such cases, and 27% “strongly” favor it, according to the Pew report.
Among Hispanic Catholics, there is slightly more support for the death penalty for murder convicts. In this subgroup, 30% “somewhat” support the death penalty in such cases, and 31% “strongly” support it.
Regarding the question of moral justification for the death penalty, a majority of Catholics believe it is justified in cases of murder convictions.
Among Catholics overall, 60% say capital punishment is morally justified “when someone commits a crime like murder”; among Hispanic Catholics, that number is 62%. Only 30% of Catholics believe the death penalty is morally wrong, including 35% of Hispanic Catholics.
Among religious subgroups, white evangelical and non-evangelical Protestants are most likely to believe the death penalty is morally justified in cases such as murder. More than three-quarters, 77%, of white evangelical Protestants believe this, and 76% of white non-evangelical Protestants.
Nearly two-thirds of those professing no religion “in particular,” 66%, also said that capital punishment is justified in such instances.
Language in the Catechism of the Catholic Church on the use of the death penalty was updated in 2018, calling it “inadmissible.”
Pope Francis, in his 2020 encyclical Fratelli Tutti, wrote, “Today we state clearly that ‘the death penalty is inadmissible’ and the Church is firmly committed to calling for its abolition worldwide.”
In October 2020, CNA spoke with Fr. Thomas Petri regarding Pope Francis’ statements on the death penalty. Fr. Petri is currently the president and assistant professor of moral theology and pastoral studies at the Pontifical Faculty of the Immaculate Conception at the Dominican House of Studies.
He explained that the Church’s ordinary magisterium has always taught that “states have the right to inflict the penalty of death.” He added that “no pope can somehow come out and contradict that.”
Pope Francis, he said, did not say the use of the death penalty was “intrinsically evil,” and thus did not contradict the Church’s ordinary magisterium.
Both popes John Paul II and Francis have made prudential applications of the Church’s teaching in areas of faith and morals, he said. Their statements on the death penalty have noted that the security of modern prisons has rendered the need for the death penalty non-existent, as a means of protecting society from criminals.
Thus, since popes have spoken frequently on the death penalty in recent years – including through encyclicals and the Catechism – Catholics cannot just prudentially disagree with their teachings, he said.
“You can probably disagree with whether or not there should be life prison terms, but not this. I don’t think you can say this about the death penalty issue,” he said.
According to a 2020 RealClear Opinion Research poll, sponsored by EWTN News, U.S. Catholics broadly supported the death penalty by a margin of 57% to 29%.
In the April 2021 Pew survey, atheists, agnostics, and Black Protestants were the most likely religious subgroups to say the death penalty is morally wrong. A slight majority of atheists, 51%, believe the death penalty is morally wrong, compared to 47% of self-identified agnostics and 42% of Black Protestants.
The US Penitentiary at Terre Haute. / Public domain.
Washington D.C., Jul 2, 2021 / 18:01 pm (CNA).
US Attorney General Merrick Garland issued a moratorium on federal executions while the Department of Justice conducts a review of its policies a… […]
The lethal injection chamber at San Quentin State Prison. / California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation via Wikimedia (CC BY 2.0).
Washington D.C., Jun 4, 2021 / 10:34 am (CNA).
A majority of U.S. adults still support the administrat… […]
Washington D.C., Jan 26, 2021 / 03:55 pm (CNA).- Dozens of members of Congress are urging the Attorney General-designate to stop use of the federal death penalty.
In a letter to Attorney General-designate Merrick Garland on Tuesday, 45 members of the House—led by Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.) and Adriano Espillat (D-N.Y.)—asked Garland to work with Congress on legislation to end the federal death penalty, once he is confirmed.
In addition, they asked Garland to take specific steps to halt or end use of the death penalty nationwide, including by revoking the Trump administration’s 2019 resumption of federal executions.
“The death penalty is a stain on the United States’ commitment to advancing justice and human rights,” the letter signed by 45 members stated. “We ask that upon confirmation you partner with Congress to enact legislation to end the federal death penalty and resentence those currently on federal death row,” the members stated.
In 2019, Attorney General William Barr—a Catholic—announced a resumption of federal executions after a nearly two-decade moratorium.
Beginning in July, a total of 13 federal death row inmates were executed by the end of the Trump administration on Jan. 20. In December and January alone, five of the inmates were executed.
The U.S. bishops’ conference condemned the executions, and in a Jan. 11 statement asked Congress and the Biden administration to stop federal executions and abolish the federal death penalty.
In one of the cases, Cardinal Joseph Tobin of Newark sent a letter to President Trump asking for clemency for Dustin Honken. Tobin noted that, while previously Archbishop of Indianapolis, he visited Honken at Terre Haute federal prison several times a year. Honken was executed in July.
The next chair of the USCCB’s doctrine committee, Bishop Daniel Flores of Brownsville, called the death penalty part of the “throwaway culture” in a Jan. 8 online panel.
While campaigning for president, Biden promised to end the federal death penalty. As a senator, however, he sponsored a 1994 criminal justice bill that expanded the number of federal offenses eligible for the death penalty.
White House press secretary Jen Psaki said on Monday that President Biden was “opposed” to the federal death penalty, but offered no details on a possible stoppage of its use.
Among the members’ requests of Garland on Tuesday are that he “[w]ithdraw authorization for all pending death penalty trial cases” and stop seeking the death penalty in any federal cases.
In addition, the members are asking that “the federal Bureau of Prisons dismantle the federal death chamber at Terre Haute prison in Indiana.”
“As the Trump Administration has undertaken an appalling rush to execute a historic number of Americans this year, it is incumbent upon the Biden Administration to reverse course and work to make America a more just society,” the letter stated.
Rep. Espillat is a Dominican-American and Catholic. He introduced legislation, H.R. 97, on Jan. 4 to abolish the death penalty under federal law.
Pressley, meanwhile, introduced the Federal Death Penalty Prohibition Act of 2021 with Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) on Jan. 11, to end federal use of the death penalty and provide for the re-sentencing of federal inmates currently on death row.
CNA Staff, Jan 13, 2021 / 03:39 pm (CNA).- Lisa Montgomery, the only woman on federal death row, was executed early Wednesday morning, despite her attorneys’ arguments that her severe mental illness rendered her unable to understand why she was b… […]
Washington D.C., Jan 11, 2021 / 03:34 pm (CNA).- In a joint statement Jan. 11, the U.S. bishops’ domestic justice chair Archbishop Paul Coakley of Oklahoma City, joined by pro-life chair Archbishop Joseph Naumann, called for a stop to planned fed… […]
Washington, D.C. Newsroom, Jan 8, 2021 / 02:19 pm (CNA).- A woman convicted of murdering a woman and stealing her unborn child should be granted clemency ahead of her scheduled execution on Jan. 12, her lawyer told CNA.
Lisa Montgomery was sentenced to death in 2007 for the Dec. 16, 2004 murder of Bobbie Jo Stinnett, a 23-year-old woman who was eight months pregnant. Montgomery, who told Stinnett her name was “Darlene Fischer,” claimed to be pregnant as well, and the two communicated online prior to meeting at Stinnett’s home in Skidmore, Missouri.
Montgomery strangled Stinnett, and then cut her stomach to deliver the child, a girl, via a rudimentary cesarean section. The newborn baby girl was discovered, alive, one day later when Montgomery was arrested in Kansas. Montgomery reportedly told her husband that the baby was hers.
The federal government tried the case in part as it involved a kidnapping over state lines.
“We’ve asked President Trump to commute Mrs. Montgomery’s sentence from death to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole … for several reasons,” Kelley Henry, lead counsel on the case, said to CNA in a phone interview Jan. 6.
“First, she is a person who suffers from serious mental illness as well as brain damage, and a lifetime of physical and sexual torture at the hands of her caregivers, and the men that her mother trafficked her to, for years,” said Henry.
Henry noted that despite the documentation of numerous similar crimes in the United States, Montgomery is the only person to be sentenced to death on either the federal or state levels.
“The prosecution normally understands that people who commit this particular sort of crime are individuals with severe mental illness and trauma history,” Henry explained.
“Mrs. Montgomery’s trauma history is the most severe of any case I’ve ever seen in 30 years of practice.”
Unlike others on death row, Montgomery “has expressed deep and severe remorse from the moment of her arrest,” said Henry.
Henry told CNA that those who wish to see Montgomery’s sentence commuted to life in prison without the possibility of parole to visit the website SaveLisa.org, sign the petition, and write “letters and emails” to the president and other leaders.
“These executions are, after all, carried out in the names of the citizens of the United States, and they should make it be known to the president that they would support mercy in this case,” said Henry, “which would be life in prison without the possibility of parole.”
CNA Staff, Dec 10, 2020 / 12:19 am (CNA).- The use of lethal injections will no longer be allowed for executions in the state of Ohio, and an alternative method must be found if capital punishment is to continue in the state, Governor Mike DeWine said … […]
CNA Staff, Dec 7, 2020 / 10:00 am (CNA).- Leading U.S. bishops are imploring the Trump administration to stop scheduled federal executions during the season of Advent.
“This Advent, the Lord comes to love us even though we don’t deserve it… […]
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