With the media focused on the execution of Saddam Hussein, now is as good a time as any to re-read and reflect on what the Catechism has to say about the death penalty:
Assuming that the guilty party's identity andresponsibility have been fully determined, the traditional teaching of theChurch does not exclude recourse to the death penalty, if this is the onlypossible way of effectively defending human lives against the unjust aggressor.
If, however, nonlethal means are sufficient to defend and protect people'ssafety from the aggressor, authority will limit itself to such means, as theseare more in keeping with the concrete conditions of the common good and are morein conformity to the dignity of the human person.
Today, in fact, as a consequence of the possibilities which the state has foreffectively preventing crime, by rendering one who has committed an offenseincapable of doing harm - without definitely taking away from him thepossibility of redeeming himself - the cases in which the execution of theoffender is an absolute necessity are very rare, if not practically nonexistent.
In keeping with the treatment of war within the Catechism, the magisterium seems toview the death penalty as a subspecies of killing in self-defense. That is, the hierarchy's position appears to be that the death penalty is appropriate only as a means to definitively prevent a criminal from committing future violent acts.
A story could be told in which Hussein's execution was justifiable. There's obviously little doubt that he committed the crimes for which he was ultimately executed. (Note that I don't think admitting as much commits one in any way to the justice of Bush's war in Iraq. There's little point denying that Hussein was a thug and a tyrant.) Also justifying his execution would be the possibility that, if he had not been killed, Hussein might one day have escaped from confinement, or been released by some future Iraqi government, regained power and reimposed his murderous regime. This possibility seems to me to be remote, but its improbability is mitigated by the chaos that currently reigns in Iraq and, in light of the atrocities he committed while in power, by the scope of the harm he might have caused had it come to pass.
One thing that I think cannot legitimately be used to jusitfy his execution, at least on my reading of the magisterium's statements in this area, is the encouragement his continued existence would have had on the Iraqi insurgency. According to the Catechism, "[p]unishment has the primary aim of redressing the disorder introduced bythe offense." What this restitutionary, or, perhaps, restorative, orientation seems to rule out is the use of punishment primarily in order to influence the behavior of third parties, a use that would reduce the person punished to a mere means to an end. Accordingly, assuming that Hussein could be safely confined for the remainder of his natural life, the fact that his death might discourage acts of violence by his supporters in the Iraqi insurgency could not have been used to justify his execution. If this desire to take the wind out of the insurgency's sails (or perhaps a less narrowly tailored desire to demonstrate its power -- again with a similar eye towards weakening the insurgency) is what motivated the Iraqi government to execute Saddam Hussein so quickly, then the execution was not justified.
On the role of our own government in all of this, Josh Marshall has this to say:
The Iraq War has been many things, but for its prime promoters andcheerleaders and now-dwindling body of defenders, the war and all itsideological and literary trappings have always been an exercise inmoral-historical dress-up for a crew of folks whose times aren't grandenough to live up to their own self-regard and whose imaginations aregreat enough to make up the difference. This is just more play-acting.
These jokers are being dragged kicking and screaming to therealization that the whole thing's a mess and that they're going to beremembered for it -- defined by it -- for decades andcenturies. But before we go, we can hang Saddam. Quite a bit of thiswas about the president's issues with his dad and the hang-ups he hadabout finishing Saddam off -- so before we go, we can hang the guy assome big cosmic 'So There!'
It goes without saying that if Josh's reading of this is correct -- that this execution was directed by Washington and is just the last gasp of the President's Iraq fiasco, a reading that strikes me as certainly a reasonable one in light of the circumstances -- then the execution falls far short of the standards set forth by the Catechism on any number of levels.
