National Catholic Register News
Theologian Father Thomas Petri of the Dominican House of Studies says that Pope Francis is speaking in continuity with recent popes including Pope St. John Paul II, who issued “a very strong statement” about capital punishment in his 1995 encyclical Evangelium Vitae.
The major-party U.S. presidential platforms take opposing sides on capital punishment, Trump in support and Biden newly opposed.
On Wednesday, the federal government executed a Navajo man convicted of a double murder, Lezmond Mitchell, despite the objections of the Navajo Nation, on whose territory the crime took place.
COMMENTARY: Cardinal Tobin’s letter to President Trump, requesting clemency for a convicted murderer, drew attention to a pair of important aspects of the Church’s contemporary consideration of capital punishment.
Bishop Baylon called on lawmakers to enact policies that respect human dignity and focus on “a justice that promotes healing and rehabilitation."
The U.S. Supreme Court’s rejection of legal challenges against the reinstitution of federal executions has renewed the national debate over the death penalty.
Purkey is the second federal prisoner to be executed this week, following the execution of Daniel Lewis Lee on Tuesday.
Lee was sentenced to death in the 1996 murders of a family of three, including an eight-year-old girl.
Archbishop Paul Coakley of Oklahoma City, who chairs the U.S. bishops’ domestic justice committee, has also called for the government to stop the executions.
In July 2019, Attorney General William Barr announced that the Department of Justice and the Federal Bureau of Prisons would resume federal executions for the first time in nearly 20 years.
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