Capital Punishment and Catholics

Capital punishment throughout history has had many faces in our society. In the early twentieth century capital punishment was viewed as an integral part of the criminal justice system. In the United States alone approximately thirteen thousand people have been legally executed sine the colonial times (ACLU, 2003). By the 1930's up to 150 people were executed yearly, because of various legal challenges the execution rate was almost zero by 1967. In 1972, the U.S. Supreme Court banned the practice of capital punishment, citing the death penalty as it was practiced, cruel and unusual punishment arbitrarily administered by the courts and thus unconstitutional in Furman v. Georgia (Costanzo, 18). In 1976, in Gregg v. Georgia, the Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty stating that under guided discretion the courts again could impose capital punishment for crimes such as murder with special circumstances (Costanzo, 21). Since having the death penalty reinstated in 1976 by the Supreme Court, society has a whole still favors capital punishment, but because of the nature of the punishment there is still a split among society as to the appropriateness of the sanction. In today’s society there are those that are apposed and there are those that are in favor of the death penalty, but the majority still views capital punishment as a staple in the criminal justice system. Public opinion polls show approximately seventy percent of the U.S population currently approves of the use capital punishment (ACLU, 2003). Even with a high approval rate among the population in the United States there is still a large population of people with religious arguments against capital punishment, catholic society by the nature of humanity and evolution has realized that capital punishment is less and less a moral and ethical punishment for capital crimes such as murder. In examining the history of the Catholic Church and the Catholic Church’s moral teachings in regards to the death penalty