Macalia God's Justice And Ours Analysis

In God’s Justice and Ours Associate Justice Antonin Scalia explains why he is not opposed to the death penalty. He first argues from a legal perspective, declaring that the founders of the United States Constitution did not exclude the death penalty when they adopted the eighth amendment. As a Judge, Scalia believes this fact is crucial to his argument because the Supreme Court’s duty is to interpret the law, not rewrite it. Scalia later argues from a historical and theological perspective, demonstrating how Christian Tradition has always defended the use of the death penalty. He asserts that this point in particular strengthens his argument that the death penalty is not necessarily immoral, despite the Catholic Church’s new apparent opposition

Nevertheless, the question of the morality of the death penalty is very important to him. So much so, he asserts that any justice who believes the death penalty to be immoral ought to resign from their position. This is because there is a temptation—especially among his fellow justices—to exploit the powers of their office by reversing existing laws or overturning cases involving the death penalty. He later explains that other Justices do this because they interpret the constitution as a living document, and subsequently believe that society’s definition of “cruel and unusual” is ever evolving—which is an apparent indication that society is inevitably “maturing”.

Scalia does not believe this to be true. Affirming that the eighth amendment, which prohibits “cruel and unusual punishments”, had never excluded or limited the death penalty when it was first adopted. This fact is important to Scalia; as he believes the Constitution is an “enduring document”—a document in which the original principles and intentions need to be permanently

John Paul II on the issue of the death penalty. He asserts that the Pope's position contradicts two thousand years of Christian tradition—Scalia believes the papal encyclical Evangelium Vitae denies that the death penalty can be justified by retribution. But Scalia argues that the death penalty is not fundamentally immoral, precisely because retribution is a sufficiently moral reason to implement such a punishment.

After consulting experts on canonical law, Scalia says he determined that the Pope’s encyclical and the latest version of the Catechism of the Catholic Church did not make this a teaching binding on all the faithful—it only required attentive and respectful deliberation. Scalia later humorously notes that it would been remarkable for a couple of paragraphs in one encyclical—an encyclical almost entirely dedicated to abortion and euthanasia (rather than crime and punishment)—to completely unravel twenty centuries of Christian