OPINION - Guest writer

A just punishment

Justice and mercy must co-exist

In Arkansas, eight executions have been scheduled in April, starting with two on Easter Monday. I hope the governor will stop them.

In debating the morality of capital punishment, a touchstone for me is a crime that occurred in Cheshire, Conn., 10 years ago. Late one night two intruders entered the home of the Petit family: a physician, his wife, and their two daughters. The intruders stayed for hours. The father survived. His family did not. The killers were captured. How should they be punished?

Until recently, Christian opinion has generally supported capital punishment for heinous crimes, and under some conditions the case for it is strong. On the American frontier, for example, jails were scarce and unreliable. The execution of a violent criminal might be the only sure defense against him.

In societies with secure prisons, the moral case for executions is more difficult, but still powerful. The heart of it is retribution. Retribution isn't vengeance. Vengeance is an appetite, like thirst; retribution is a moral principle. It means requital according to merits or deserts, especially for evil. Retribution is a moral law in theologian Richard Hooker's meaning of the word: a rule for telling us what ought to happen. A crime should be punished and the punishment should fit the crime.

There are other moral theories. Some say the purpose of punishment is to deter others from committing crimes or preventing an offender from repeating them. Those are worthy ends. They invite debate as to whether a specific punishment is an effective or necessary means.

For the theory of retribution, such debates are beside the point. It holds that the good or bad we do in life merits a response from the world or God. Cardinal Avery Dulles sums it up: "In principle, guilt calls for punishment. The graver the offense, the more severe the punishment ought to be." Tooth for tooth--but eye for eye.

Dulles tells us how Thomas Aquinas applied that principle in his case for capital punishment: "Aquinas held that sin calls for the deprivation of some good, such as, in serious cases, the good of temporal or even eternal life. By consenting to the punishment of death, the wrongdoer is placed in a position to expiate his evil deeds and escape punishment in the next life."

Dulles adds a cautionary note. According to Aquinas: "Retribution by the state has its limits because the state, unlike God, enjoys neither omniscience nor omnipotence. According to Christian faith, God will render to every man according to his works at the final judgment ... . Retribution by the state can only be a symbolic anticipation of God's perfect justice."

So Aquinas regarded earthly retribution as humane to the offender. C.S. Lewis agreed.

Lewis also agreed that the just punishment for someone taking someone else's life was giving up his own. When opponents of capital punishment objected that by the sixth commandment God commands us not to kill, Lewis replied that what the commandment actually forbids is murder. All murder is killing; not all killing is murder. There is a vast moral difference between killing a child and killing to protect one. That difference is recognized by every law except the appetite for vengeance.

Others objected to Lewis that we as Christians are required to love our enemies. In Mere Christianity, Lewis replied: "Does loving your enemy mean not punishing him? No, for loving myself does not mean that I ought not to submit myself to punishment, even to death. If one had committed a murder, the right Christian thing to do would be to give yourself up to the police and be hanged. It is, therefore, in my opinion, perfectly right for a Christian judge to sentence a man to death."

I love C.S. Lewis, but he exaggerates. Let's remember what Aquinas said: For human judges, what is perfectly right is impossible to know, so for perfect justice we will have to wait for God. For purposes of symbolic anticipation of that perfect justice, death by old age in prison seems as just a retribution as death by lethal injection now. The two are close enough to make the same point.

So I don't think we ought to execute the men we now hold in prison.

For crimes like those suffered by the Petit family in Connecticut, human retribution is impossible. We have no punishment to match such crimes. In faith, we wait with hope that wrongs are righted in the end.

In faith, we also bow to mercy. We know that God has purposes beyond making punishments fit crimes. In the Bible we see God being merciful to Cain who had killed his brother, to David who had conspired to have Uriah killed in battle, to Peter who had melted under pressure, and to Paul who had persecuted Christians. Jesus stopped the execution of a woman who had committed what the law held to be a capital offense.

In the perfect justice that we wait for, wrongs are righted in ways that are merciful to all. As mercy is dispensed we will see justice in it too. Mercy and retribution--moral judgments that look like opposites to us--are mysteriously united in the law that is written in God's heart.

If you ask how that happens, I don't know. Faith lives with some unanswered questions. My hope that our governor will stop these executions is embedded in a grander hope in which the Petit family's pleas are heard and satisfied. As mercy seasons justice, justice seasons mercy too.

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The Very Rev. Dr. Christoph Keller III is Dean of Trinity Episcopal Cathedral.

Editorial on 03/30/2017

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