The key question today: is there a way to guarantee the safety of citizens without killing criminals. In most cases the answer is yes.
267. Here I would stress that “it is impossible to imagine that states today have no other means than capital punishment to protect the lives of other people from the unjust aggressor”.
Once a human authority steps outside of the law of the land to kill it is probably accurate to label it as “murder.” It is little better than crime, only a bit more organized:
Particularly serious in this regard are so-called extrajudicial or extralegal executions, which are “homicides deliberately committed by certain states and by their agents, often passed off as clashes with criminals or presented as the unintended consequences of the reasonable, necessary and proportionate use of force in applying the law”. [Address to Delegates of the International Association of Penal Law (23 October 2014): AAS 106 (2014), 842]
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Catholic Sensibility 