Justice

 I certainly won't be watching. But the popes held public executions for hundreds of years as did most Catholic monarchs, including canonized saints. It was perceived as a matter of safety for innocent people, and thus the duty of the ruler. It would not have occurred to anyone that it was a bad thing to execute a murderous criminal in the town square/marketplace. Only if the person was clearly innocent, like St. Joan of Arc, did people object. The Soviets were big on private executions. People would just disappear. Their loved ones never knew what became of them. Also, private executions can lead to doubt whether the person really died. Interesting take here from a few years ago: 

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.)

 

From The Enterprise:

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.)

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