marineimaging
Texas Baptist now living in Colorado
- Jul 14, 2014
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"The death penalty was never employed arbitrarily or frivolously. In fact, observing the use of capital punishment in the Old Testament actually shows us how precious human life is to God. Because human beings are image-bearers of God, murder was such a serious affront to both God and man that it had to be answered with the blood of the murderer. Genesis 9:6 suggests that this sense of justice is woven into the moral fabric of Creation."
This was not a minor change in Papal policy. This decision was drastic and impactful to all courts all over the world. What was once accepted as supported has now been rendered drastically opposed to past practices. Therefore you can bet there are a lot of people, Catholics included, who are wondering about the Pope's state of mind on this one. If he is concerned at having heard of a potential for the innocent to be executed, then there is a lot to consider. We all know that the few cases where an innocent might have been executed wrongly was most probably based on events that happened before forensic evidence as we know it today was available or even admitted in court. So, rather than let our answers be guided by yesteryear let's pose this question in light of TODAY's forensic evidence capabilities and our systems of checks and balances that are in place today.
As a matter of discourse one can't have heard of too many stories of the executed in America being found innocent because to be true that would require a new trial with admission of severe wrongdoing or extra weighty new evidence that was not available at the original hearing. Since the deceased cannot be resurrected or tried again there might be one out of a thousand judges that would rehear a case postmortem. Secondly, you don't just get handed a death sentence because you did one thing bad or one bad thing. Not for jaywalking, not prostitution, not even for burglary or strong-arm robbery. No, there is almost always additional and usually horrible characteristics to the conviction, such as especially heinous acts during the commission of a murder or the commission of multiple murders or rape. Or that the person has been found guilty numerous times and has proven to have such a horrible history that execution is truly the last resort. I mean, this person has proven to be nonredeemable in so many ways. In many cases of believing that an innocent person was executed the fact is that there might have been more of a technical trip-up, but that doesn't mean that criminal didn't pull the trigger on that victim. It usually means that an eyewitness said the shooters shirt was red when it proved to be hot pink with reddish dots or the getaway vehicle was a GMC pickup and not a Chevrolet like granny witness number 23 of 24 said.
What happened to a few people a hundred years ago in the courts, be it wrong in so many ways, still has no bearing on what we do today.
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