Editorial

It is a thorny question. Fifty years ago it would not have been. Capital punishment was on the statute books of all European countries. It was opponents to the measure such as Ludovic Kennedy, who wrote his celebrated book Innocent But Hanged in the early 1960s, that brought about a sufficiently strong enough change in society's attitude in the UK to the question of hanging and the abolition of capital punishment.

In his book, Mr Kennedy brought before the public gaze three cases of people who were hanged and who were, years later, shown to be innocent of the crime for which they had been sent to the gallows. Since then, as the Compendium Of The Social Doctrine Of The Church, 2004, published by the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, has described the development away from capital punishment, a "growing awareness of public opinion towards the death penalty and the various provisions aimed at abolishing it or suspending its application constitute visible manifestations of a heightened moral awareness".

Still, the majority of the world's population lives in societies where capital punishment has not been formally abolished: India, China, Russia, a number of states in the United States and all Muslim countries. Islam, Judaism and Christianity have all been favourable to capital punishment, Christianity until very recently, Judaism with much circumspection (the Israeli state retained capital punishment only for those found guilty of holocaust crimes - and only one man, Adolf Eichmann, received a death sentence on this account).

By 1980, a majority at the National Conference of Catholic Bishops in the UK approved a negative statement on capital punishment, though not by the required two-thirds majority. Fifteen years later, Pope John Paul II published his magnificent encyclical The Gospel of Life.

As a consequence, changes were made to the Catechism in 1997 so that this declared that "Assuming that the guilty party's identity and responsibility have been fully determined, the traditional teaching of the Church does not exclude recourse to the death penalty if this is the only possible way of effectively defending human lives against the unjust aggressor... non-lethal means (may be) more in keeping with the concrete conditions of the common good and more in conformity with the dignity of the human person. Today... the cases in which the execution of the offender is an absolute necessity are rare, if practically non-existent".

There are cases, of course, that must give us pause. The prosecutor at Saddam Hussein's trial in Iraq has called for a death sentence. Should the "guilty party's identity and responsibility have been fully determined", it can be argued that there is an ethical case to be made for the death sentence to be administered. The judge may conclude, without having even glanced at the Catechism or even known of its existence, that "non-lethal means" to deal with him are not sufficient to defend and protect people's safety....

Had the Iraqi dictator been tried at The Hague he would have had the assurance that whatever his degree of guilt, the death sentence would not be imposed. As it is, he is being tried in Iraq where the prosecutor at his trial has unhesitatingly called for the maximum punishment to be imposed on a prisoner who has been accused of genocide among other crimes.

Is he right to do so? There will be those who will disagree with his request; others will be in total agreement. We must all pay for our mistakes but two wrongs will never make a right.