The Grand Duchy of Tuscany had become the first sovereign state to
ban the death penalty in 1786, 10 years before Bugatti took up his ax. It did
so under the influence of Italian essayist Cesare Beccaria, whose 1764
anti-death penalty tract “On Crimes and Punishments” is considered a
classic.
So strong had Italian aversion to capital punishment become that
when an anarchist named Angelo Bresci assassinated King Umberto I in 1900,
Italian courts sentenced him to life in prison. It was the first time a man had
killed a European king (without toppling his regime) and not been executed.
Yet the Catholic church was never part of this development. The
guillotine was busy up to the very last minute of the pope-king’s regime.
Its final use came on July 9, 1870, just two months before Italian
revolutionaries captured Rome.
What explains this stubbornness? In part, that Catholic standby --
tradition. Christian writers since the fourth century had defended capital
punishment.
St. Augustine did so in The City of God. “Since the
agent of authority is but a sword in the hand [of God], it is in no way
contrary to the commandment ‘Thou shalt not kill’ for the
representative of the state’s authority to put criminals to death,”
he wrote.
Augustine saw the death penalty as a form of charity.
“Inflicting capital punishment … protects those who are undergoing it
from the harm they may suffer … through increased sinning, which might
continue if their life went on.”
Aquinas followed Augustine in the 13th century in Summa Contra
Gentiles. “The civil rulers execute, justly and sinlessly, pestiferous
men in order to protect the state,” he wrote.
The Cathechism of the Council of Trent, issued in 1566, solidly
endorsed capital punishment as an act of “paramount obedience” to the
fifth commandment against murder.
Nor was this tradition confined to the Middle Ages. As late as
Sept. 14, 1952, Pope Pius XII echoed its logic. “It is reserved to the
public power to deprive the condemned of the benefit of life, in expiation of
his fault, when already he has dispossessed himself of the right to live,”
he said.
The leading abolitionists of the 18th and 19th centuries were
Enlightenment-inspired critics of revealed religion. Popes defended their right
to send people to death because to do otherwise seemed tantamount to abandoning
belief in eternal life.
Catholic scholar James Megivern summed up the tradition this way:
“If tempted to waver, one needed only to consult the bedrock authorities
from Aquinas to Suarez. Questioning it could seem an act of arrogant temerity.
If one did not believe in the death penalty, what other parts of the Christian
faith might one also be daring or arrogant enough to doubt or deny?”
All of which makes the shift in thinking under John Paul II
astonishing.
In the 1995 encyclical Evangelium Vitae, John Paul wrote
that the only time executions can be justified is when they are required
“to defend society,” and that “as a result of steady
improvements … in the penal system such cases are very rare if not
practically nonexistent.”
When the new Catechism of the Catholic Church appeared, it did not
ban capital punishment, but expressed a strong preference for “bloodless
means.” Such strategies, it said, “better correspond to the concrete
conditions of the common good and are more in conformity to the dignity of the
human person.” (Read more.)
Think about what we already accept. The Sixth Amendment guarantees
the accused a public trial. In Richmond Newspapers v. Virginia (1980),
Chief Justice Warren Burger traced the open courtroom from the English
assizes through the colonial courthouse and concluded that “a
presumption of openness inheres in the very nature of a criminal trial.”
Burger’s reason had nothing to do with whether spectators enjoy trials.
A judge who knows he is being watched is less likely to cut corners, a
prosecutor under observation is more careful with the truth, and a
public that can see justice done is more likely to believe it was done.
Every one of those reasons applies with greater force to the moment when
the state actually kills a man. The trial decides whether the
government may take a life. The execution is the taking. We have
arranged things so that the deliberation is open and the act is hidden,
which is exactly backward.
For
most of American history nobody would have found that arrangement
natural. Colonial hangings took place in town squares and courthouse
yards, usually with a sermon. Pennsylvania and New York began moving
executions inside prison walls in the 1830s, and the other states
followed over the next 70 years, with Virginia still hanging men
publicly in Richmond until 1907. Britain made the same move in 1868 with
the Capital Punishment Amendment Act. What strikes you about the 1866
parliamentary debate that preceded it is that almost nobody in the
chamber wanted to abolish hanging. The question was whether the public
should see it. Defenders of the old practice argued that publicity was
the only guarantee the sentence was carried out, and that it was carried
out the same way against a lord as against a laborer. Opponents
answered that the crowds at Newgate treated the morning as a holiday.
Both sides were right; the opponents won, and the rule they left behind,
that the state should inform the public of executions without letting
it watch, has governed Anglo-American practice ever since.
The
American endpoint came on August 14, 1936, in Owensboro, Kentucky, when
something like 20,000 people turned out to see Rainey Bethea hanged.
Kentucky permitted public hanging for rape but required murderers to die
inside the penitentiary, so prosecutors charged Bethea with rape alone
even though he had confessed to killing his victim. The crowd behaved
like the Newgate crowd, with vendors and picnics, and the national press
was appalled. Kentucky abolished public hanging in 1938. Since then an
American execution has been witnessed by a few dozen designated people,
officials, a handful of reporters, relatives of the victim, a
representative of the condemned, while the rest of the country reads a
wire story the next morning. (Read more.)
