The resolve of the present government to hang those on Death Row after their appeals have been exhausted will bring no decrease in violent crime in our country.

Apart from the fact that there are complex reasons for the surge in crime, many of which are not spoken about, the death penalty is inherently flawed and goes against the principles of natural justice.

That Lester Pitman committed a heinous crime is in no doubt whatsoever; that the families of John Cropper, Maggie Lee and Lynette Lithgow-Pearson are still in grief is indisputable. But what is also indisputable from a gospel perspective is that all life is sacred, even that of the one who takes it.

Most of the Catholic world is still playing catch-up with Pope John Paul II's Evangelium Vitae : “The nature and extent of the punishment must be carefully evaluated and decided upon and ought not go to the extreme of executing the offender, except in cases of absolute necessity; in other words, when it would not be possible otherwise to defend society.

Today, however, as a result of steady improvements in the organisation of the penal system, such cases are very rare if not practically non-existent.” This is a hard teaching for Catholics the world over to accept. It deviates from centuries of Catholic tradition in which the Church supported the right of the state to employ the death penalty.

It will take some time for this new teaching to be “received” and so it is no surprise the majority of our population, including most Catholics, will continue to reject this new direction in moral thought.

WIDER SOCIAL FACTORS

There are other reasons that we have given in the past and reiterate here today why the death penalty is wrong. Both in our own country and around the world, those who bear the brunt of the death penalty are the poor.

It is inconceivable, therefore, for the Church to maintain “an option for the poor” while at the same time consenting to the death penalty as a punishment which primarily the poor will bear. There are also the wider social factors which are hardly mentioned in the discourse on capital punishment.

The conditions for financial aid placed on small Third World nations by the IMF and World Bank have the same effects everywhere – increase in crime, rising unemployment, homelessness, and widening of the gap between rich and poor. It is wrong for the poor alone to pay with their lives for social conditions exacerbated by external forces.

There is also the irony of race. Most of the criminals on Death Row are poor and black. Are they the only ones who commit crime? What about “white-collar” criminals who can afford the best legal defence, invariably being set free on some legal technicality, but whose damage to the economy is more intractable and long-term?

Politicians must guard against playing politics with the death penalty. The hesitation by the State to carry out the death penalty over several years is itself an indication of its moral uncertainty to do so. To suddenly resume hangings is borne more out of political expediency and desperation rather than sound judgement.

Why is it we refuse to look at the more complex issues like the marginalisation of the poor through reduction in social services over the past fifteen years and the lack of adequate community development?

CONSTITUTIONAL DEFICIENCIES

The death penalty debate in not only a local one. The recently discovered notes of the late US Supreme Court Judge, Justice Harry Blackmum, reveal some devastating remarks concerning the death penalty: “Twenty years have passed since this Court declared that the death penalty must be imposed fairly, and with reasonable consistency, or not at all, and, despite the efforts of the States and courts to devise legal formulas and procedural rules to meet this daunting challenge, the death penalty remains fraught with arbitrariness, discrimination, caprice and mistake … I feel morally and intellectually obligated simply to concede that the death penalty experiment has failed. It is virtually self-evident to me now that no combination of procedural rules or substantive regulations ever can save the death penalty from its inherent constitutional deficiencies.”

When the legal, humanitarian and theological arguments are taken together we cannot see how the death penalty is justifiable today. We empathize with those who have lost loved ones in horrific circumstances but we cannot add more death to a culture of death.

We will not support the death penalty for as Martin Luther King said, “Capital punishment is society's ultimate statement that it will not forgive .”