'WHY DIDN'T THEY ASK EVANS?' INDEED

Why Didn't They Ask Evans? Indeed …

Paul du Fresne comments on Facebook on my post on capital punishment as follows: "Timothy Evans would be gratified no doubt. And what about the seventh of the tenth (sic) commandments you keep banging on about - or do you know better?"

Timothy Evans was a cause celebre of the movement to banish capital punishment. Why Didn't They Ask Evans? was the book which gave it oxygen and was often quoted by my mother in her support for it.

The Seventh Commandment is, of course, "You shall not kill". It forbids killing by the individual (as in abortion for instance), which is properly called murder, but does not proscribe the legal judgment of capital punishment by the properly constituted authority of a democratically elected government.

To quote The Catechism of the Catholic Church (2266): 'The traditional teaching of the Church has acknowledged as well-founded the right and duty of legitimate public authority to punish malefactors by means of penalties commensurate with the gravity of the crime not excluding, in cases of extreme gravity, the death penalty.'

Getting over-exercised about the possibility of a wrongful sentence of death, as in the case of Timothy Evans, is evidence of a temporal perspective - not moderating it with the true perspective, which is that of eternity. We can and may - as perhaps with Evans - make a wrong call in sentencing an innocent man/woman to death, but God always judges justly. He will take into account that person's wrongful loss of life. It will not affect their chances of eternal happiness, which after all is the only reason for our life here on earth.

Capital punishment is not, like abortion and euthanasia, an intrinsic evil. In 2004 Pope Benedict, as Cardinal Ratzinger, told the US bishops that "it may still be permissible to have recourse to capital punishment. There may be a legitimate diversity of opinion even among Catholics about applying the death penalty, but not however with regard to abortion or euthanasia.".

Capital punishment is, if you like, an extension of the principle of self-defence, applied to society. If we hadn't abolished the death penalty, would the taxpayer now be footing mega-bills for building mega-gaols?