Pope makes right call on death penalty

Pope Francis has thrown the weight of the Catholic Church behind the death-penalty abolition movement, releasing a new church teaching that says – quoting a speech by the Pope last year that ‘‘the death penalty is inadmissible because it is an attack on the inviolability and dignity of the person’’.

That may come as a surprise to Catholics who thought the church already opposed the death penalty. And it did, in most instances, but it had carved out an exception if an execution was ‘‘the only possible way of effectively defending human lives against the unjust aggressor’’ (though Pope John Paul II wrote in his 1995 ‘‘Evangelium Vitae’’ on the sanctity of life that those circumstances ‘‘are very rare, if not practically nonexistent’’).

The new teaching isn’t likely to shift the weight of the debate over the death penalty, but in making the adjustment the church (finally) gets it exactly right and follows personal observations Francis has made in the past.

The capital punishment system in the United States has been rife with errors that have probably led to the execution of innocent people. In fact, one study published in 2014 by the National Academy of Sciences estimated that at least 4 per cent of people on death row are innocent. Which means capital punishment is not only immoral in concept, as Pope Francis points out, but also unreliable in practice.