Where capital punishment is used such mistakes cannot be put right. The death penalty legitimizes an irreversible act of violence by the state and will inevitably claim innocent victims.

Sociological evidence on the deterrent effect of the death penalty as currently practiced is ambiguous, conflicting, and far from probative. Avery Cardinal Dulles, Catholicism and Capital ...

While the vast majority of U.S. Catholics support capital punishment, Pope John Paul II has declared the Church's near total opposition to the death penalty. In his encyclical "Evangelium Vitae ...

But that is never the reality for Black and brown people facing the death penalty. A process called death qualification excludes people from capital juries if they do not believe in the death penalty.