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Death penalty interferes with ‘God’s merciful judgment’ Catholic News Service
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ebate over the death penalty and a proposal to reinstate a firing squad in Utah “seems to suggest growing recognition among legislators of the precarious place any state occupies when it tries to take on a role best left to God,” Bishop John C. Wester said. “At its core, the death penalty is repugnant to us because of our firmly held belief that only God can give life and, consequently, only God can rightly take it away,” the Salt Lake City bishop wrote in the diocesan newspaper, Intermountain Catholic, on Feb. 27. On March 10, the state Senate passed a measure to reinstate execution by firing squad for those convicted of capital crimes. The state House passed it in February. Utah’s lawmakers argued they needed a backup method of capital punishment if the drugs used in lethal injection are not available. There is a shortage of lethal drugs for executions and their use in carrying out the death penalty has become more controversial after the botched execution of Clayton Lockett in Oklahoma who struggled in pain for 40 minutes before dying of apparent heart failure. In April, the U.S. Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in Glossip v. Gross, a case brought by four death-row inmates in Oklahoma. On March 9, the court said it would take a Florida case challenging the state’s protocol for handing down a death penalty sentence. Currently, the 32 states that have the death penalty use lethal injections and many are looking at new methods for carrying it out. Utah would become the only state to allow firing squads if Republican Gov. Gary Herbert signs the measure into law. He had not signed the bill as of this writing but was said to be leaning toward signing it. “The death penalty in any form is abhorrent,” Bishop Wester said, but with regard to the firing squad method, “strapping a person to a chair with a hood over his head and a bull’s eye on his heart creates a disturbing image of
The electric chair that executed 125 men between 1916 and 1960 in Tennessee is seen on display at the National Museum of Crime and Punishment in Washington March 5.
the individual as little more than a target at a shooting range.” “Our Catholic faith rests on a belief that every life is a gift, and Jim Lo Scalzo, EPA, every moment of life Catholic News Service is an opportunity for God to work within each of us,” he said. But if the state can choose to take life, “we give the state the power to shut down God’s acts of grace within an individual,” he continued. “God does not abandon even the most violent criminal. He offers salvation to everyone at all times, but when the state carries out an execution it terminates the convicted person’s opportunity to return to a right relationship with God against God’s wishes, thus aborting any chance the person may have had to repent and be forgiven for his or her crime.” Bishop Wester said there is no justification the state can offer “for its continued practice of interfering with God’s merciful judgment in order to impose the death penalty for capital crimes.” Writing before the state Senate voted on the firing squad bill, he had expressed hope that given the floor debate over it seemed an “opportune time for legislators to discuss the sanctity of life and how it is denigrated by the current state policy of sanctioning the killing of people as retribution.” He called for the lawmakers to commission an in-depth study of the death penalty in Utah. APRIL 2015 | SOUTH TEXAS CATHOLIC 41