Gods
Justice and Ours
Antonin Scalia
Antonin Scalia is a Justice of the Supreme Court of the United
States. This article is adapted from remarks given at a conference
sponsored by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life at the University
of Chicago Divinity School.
Before proceeding to discuss the morality of capital punishment, I
want to make clear that my views on the subject have nothing to do with
how I vote in capital cases that come before the Supreme Court. That
statement would not be true if I subscribed to the conventional fallacy
that the Constitution is a “living document”—that is, a text that means
from age to age whatever the society (or perhaps the Court) thinks it
ought to mean.
In recent years, that philosophy has been particularly well enshrined
in our Eighth Amendment jurisprudence, our case law dealing with the
prohibition of “cruel and unusual punishments.” Several of our opinions
have said that what falls within this prohibition is not static, but
changes from generation to generation, to comport with “the evolving
standards of decency that mark the progress of a maturing society.”
Applying that principle, the Court came close, in 1972, to abolishing
the death penalty entirely. It ultimately did not do so, but it has
imposed, under color of the Constitution, procedural and substantive
limitations that did not exist when the Eighth Amendment was adopted—and
some of which had not even been adopted by a majority of the states at
the time they were judicially decreed. For example, the Court has
prohibited the death penalty for all crimes except murder, and indeed
even for what might be called run–of–the–mill murders, as opposed to
those that are somehow characterized by a high degree of brutality or
depravity. It has prohibited the mandatory imposition of the death
penalty for any crime, insisting that in all cases the jury be permitted
to consider all mitigating factors and to impose, if it wishes, a lesser
sentence. And it has imposed an age limit at the time of the offense (it
is currently seventeen) that is well above what existed at common law.
If I subscribed to the proposition that I am authorized (indeed, I
suppose compelled) to intuit and impose our “maturing” society’s
“evolving standards of decency,” this essay would be a preview of my
next vote in a death penalty case. As it is, however, the Constitution
that I interpret and apply is not living but dead—or, as I prefer to put
it, enduring. It means today not what current society (much less the
Court) thinks it ought to mean, but what it meant when it was adopted.
For me, therefore, the constitutionality of the death penalty is not a
difficult, soul–wrenching question. It was clearly permitted when the
Eighth Amendment was adopted (not merely for murder, by the way, but for
all felonies—including, for example, horse–thieving, as anyone can
verify by watching a western movie). And so it is clearly permitted
today. There is plenty of room within this system for “evolving
standards of decency,” but the instrument of evolution (or, if you are
more tolerant of the Court’s approach, the herald that evolution has
occurred) is not the nine lawyers who sit on the Supreme Court of the
United States, but the Congress of the United States and the
legislatures of the fifty states, who may, within their own
jurisdictions, restrict or abolish the death penalty as they wish.
But while my views on the morality of the death penalty have nothing
to do with how I vote as a judge, they have a lot to do with whether I
can or should be a judge at all. To put the point in the blunt terms
employed by Justice Harold Blackmun towards the end of his career on the
bench, when he announced that he would henceforth vote (as Justices
William Brennan and Thurgood Marshall had previously done) to overturn
all death sentences, when I sit on a Court that reviews and affirms
capital convictions, I am part of “the machinery of death.” My vote,
when joined with at least four others, is, in most cases, the last step
that permits an execution to proceed. I could not take part in that
process if I believed what was being done to be immoral.
Capital cases are much different from the other life–and–death issues
that my Court sometimes faces: abortion, for example, or legalized
suicide. There it is not the state (of which I am in a sense the last
instrument) that is decreeing death, but rather private individuals whom
the state has decided not to restrain. One may argue (as many do) that
the society has a moral obligation to restrain. That moral obligation
may weigh heavily upon the voter, and upon the legislator who enacts the
laws; but a judge, I think, bears no moral guilt for the laws society
has failed to enact. Thus, my difficulty with Roe v. Wade is a legal
rather than a moral one: I do not believe (and, for two hundred years,
no one believed) that the Constitution contains a right to abortion. And
if a state were to permit abortion on demand, I would—and could in good
conscience—vote against an attempt to invalidate that law for the same
reason that I vote against the invalidation of laws that forbid abortion
on demand: because the Constitution gives the federal government (and
hence me) no power over the matter.
With the death penalty, on the other hand, I am part of the
criminal–law machinery that imposes death—which extends from the
indictment, to the jury conviction, to rejection of the last appeal. I
am aware of the ethical principle that one can give “material
cooperation” to the immoral act of another when the evil that would
attend failure to cooperate is even greater (for example, helping a
burglar tie up a householder where the alternative is that the burglar
would kill the householder). I doubt whether that doctrine is even
applicable to the trial judges and jurors who must themselves determine
that the death sentence will be imposed. It seems to me these
individuals are not merely engaged in “material cooperation” with
someone else’s action, but are themselves decreeing death on behalf of
the state.
The same is true of appellate judges in those states where they are
charged with “reweighing” the mitigating and aggravating factors and
determining de novo whether the death penalty should be imposed: they
are themselves decreeing death. Where (as is the case in the federal
system) the appellate judge merely determines that the sentence
pronounced by the trial court is in accordance with law, perhaps the
principle of material cooperation could be applied. But as I have said,
that principle demands that the good deriving from the cooperation
exceed the evil which is assisted. I find it hard to see how any
appellate judge could find this condition to be met, unless he believes
retaining his seat on the bench (rather than resigning) is somehow
essential to preservation of the society—which is of course absurd. (As
Charles de Gaulle is reputed to have remarked when his aides told him he
could not resign as President of France because he was the indispensable
man: “Mon ami, the cemeteries are full of indispensable men.”)
I pause here to emphasize the point that in my view the choice for
the judge who believes the death penalty to be immoral is resignation,
rather than simply ignoring duly enacted, constitutional laws and
sabotaging death penalty cases. He has, after all, taken an oath to
apply the laws and has been given no power to supplant them with rules
of his own. Of course if he feels strongly enough he can go beyond mere
resignation and lead a political campaign to abolish the death
penalty—and if that fails, lead a revolution. But rewrite the laws he
cannot do. This dilemma, of course, need not be confronted by a
proponent of the “living Constitution,” who believes that it means what
it ought to mean. If the death penalty is (in his view) immoral, then it
is (hey, presto!) automatically unconstitutional, and he can continue to
sit while nullifying a sanction that has been imposed, with no
suggestion of its unconstitutionality, since the beginning of the
Republic. (You can see why the “living Constitution” has such attraction
for us judges.)
It is a matter of great consequence to me, therefore, whether the
death penalty is morally acceptable. As a Roman Catholic—and being
unable to jump out of my skin—I cannot discuss that issue without
reference to Christian tradition and the Church’s Magisterium.
The death penalty is undoubtedly wrong unless one accords to the
state a scope of moral action that goes beyond what is permitted to the
individual. In my view, the major impetus behind modern aversion to the
death penalty is the equation of private morality with governmental
morality. This is a predictable (though I believe erroneous and
regrettable) reaction to modern, democratic self–government.
Few doubted the morality of the death penalty in the age that
believed in the divine right of kings. Or even in earlier times. St.
Paul had this to say (I am quoting, as you might expect, the King James
version):
Let every soul be subject unto the higher powers. For there is no
power but of God: the powers that be are ordained of God. Whosoever
therefore resisteth the power, resisteth the ordinance of God: and they
that resist shall receive to themselves damnation. For rulers are not a
terror to good works, but to the evil. Wilt thou then not be afraid of
the power? Do that which is good, and thou shalt have praise of the
same: for he is the minister of God to thee for good. But if thou do
that which is evil, be afraid; for he beareth not the sword in vain: for
he is the minister of God, a revenger to execute wrath upon him that
doeth evil. Wherefore ye must needs be subject, not only for wrath, but
also for conscience sake. (Romans 13:1–5)
This is not the Old Testament, I emphasize, but St. Paul. One can
understand his words as referring only to lawfully constituted
authority, or even only to lawfully constituted authority that rules
justly. But the core of his message is that government—however you want
to limit that concept—derives its moral authority from God. It is the
“minister of God” with powers to “revenge,” to “execute wrath,”
including even wrath by the sword (which is unmistakably a reference to
the death penalty). Paul of course did not believe that the individual
possessed any such powers. Only a few lines before this passage, he
wrote, “Dearly beloved, avenge not yourselves, but rather give place
unto wrath: for it is written, Vengeance is mine; I will repay, saith
the Lord.” And in this world the Lord repaid—did justice—through His
minister, the state.
These passages from Romans represent the consensus of Western thought
until very recent times. Not just of Christian or religious thought, but
of secular thought regarding the powers of the state. That consensus has
been upset, I think, by the emergence of democracy. It is easy to see
the hand of the Almighty behind rulers whose forebears, in the dim mists
of history, were supposedly anointed by God, or who at least obtained
their thrones in awful and unpredictable battles whose outcome was
determined by the Lord of Hosts, that is, the Lord of Armies. It is much
more difficult to see the hand of God—or any higher moral
authority—behind the fools and rogues (as the losers would have it) whom
we ourselves elect to do our own will. How can their power to avenge—to
vindicate the “public order”—be any greater than our own?
So it is no accident, I think, that the modern view that the death
penalty is immoral is centered in the West. That has little to do with
the fact that the West has a Christian tradition, and everything to do
with the fact that the West is the home of democracy. Indeed, it seems
to me that the more Christian a country is the less likely it is to
regard the death penalty as immoral. Abolition has taken its firmest
hold in post–Christian Europe, and has least support in the church–going
United States. I attribute that to the fact that, for the believing
Christian, death is no big deal. Intentionally killing an innocent
person is a big deal: it is a grave sin, which causes one to lose his
soul. But losing this life, in exchange for the next? The Christian
attitude is reflected in the words Robert Bolt’s play has Thomas More
saying to the headsman: “Friend, be not afraid of your office. You send
me to God.” And when Cranmer asks whether he is sure of that, More
replies, “He will not refuse one who is so blithe to go to Him.” For the
nonbeliever, on the other hand, to deprive a man of his life is to end
his existence. What a horrible act!
Besides being less likely to regard death as an utterly cataclysmic
punishment, the Christian is also more likely to regard punishment in
general as deserved. The doctrine of free will—the ability of man to
resist temptations to evil, which God will not permit beyond man’s
capacity to resist—is central to the Christian doctrine of salvation and
damnation, heaven and hell. The post–Freudian secularist, on the other
hand, is more inclined to think that people are what their history and
circumstances have made them, and there is little sense in assigning
blame.
Of course those who deny the authority of a government to exact
vengeance are not entirely logical. Many crimes—for example, domestic
murder in the heat of passion—are neither deterred by punishment meted
out to others nor likely to be committed a second time by the same
offender. Yet opponents of capital punishment do not object to sending
such an offender to prison, perhaps for life. Because he deserves
punishment. Because it is just.
The mistaken tendency to believe that a democratic government, being
nothing more than the composite will of its individual citizens, has no
more moral power or authority than they do as individuals has adverse
effects in other areas as well. It fosters civil disobedience, for
example, which proceeds on the assumption that what the individual
citizen considers an unjust law—even if it does not compel him to act
unjustly—need not be obeyed. St. Paul would not agree. “Ye must needs be
subject,” he said, “not only for wrath, but also for conscience sake.”
For conscience sake. The reaction of people of faith to this tendency of
democracy to obscure the divine authority behind government should not
be resignation to it, but the resolution to combat it as effectively as
possible. We have done that in this country (and continental Europe has
not) by preserving in our public life many visible reminders that—in the
words of a Supreme Court opinion from the 1940s—“we are a religious
people, whose institutions presuppose a Supreme Being.” These reminders
include: “In God we trust” on our coins, “one nation, under God” in our
Pledge of Allegiance, the opening of sessions of our legislatures with a
prayer, the opening of sessions of my Court with “God save the United
States and this Honorable Court,” annual Thanksgiving proclamations
issued by our President at the direction of Congress, and constant
invocations of divine support in the speeches of our political leaders,
which often conclude, “God bless America.” All this, as I say, is most
un–European, and helps explain why our people are more inclined to
understand, as St. Paul did, that government carries the sword as “the
minister of God,” to “execute wrath” upon the evildoer.
A brief story about the aftermath of September 11 nicely illustrates
how different things are in secularized Europe. I was at a conference of
European and American lawyers and jurists in Rome when the planes struck
the twin towers. All in attendance were transfixed by the horror of the
event, and listened with rapt attention to the President’s ensuing
address to the nation. When the speech had concluded, one of the
European conferees—a religious man—confided in me how jealous he was
that the leader of my nation could conclude his address with the words
“God bless the United States.” Such invocation of the deity, he assured
me, was absolutely unthinkable in his country, with its Napoleonic
tradition of extirpating religion from public life.
It will come as no surprise from what I have said that I do not agree
with the encyclical Evangelium Vitae and the new Catholic catechism (or
the very latest version of the new Catholic catechism), according to
which the death penalty can only be imposed to protect rather than
avenge, and that since it is (in most modern societies) not necessary
for the former purpose, it is wrong. That, by the way, is how I read
those documents—and not, as Avery Cardinal Dulles would read them,
simply as an affirmation of two millennia of Christian teaching that
retribution is a proper purpose (indeed, the principal purpose) of
criminal punishment, but merely adding the “prudential judgment” that in
modern circumstances condign retribution “rarely if ever” justifies
death. (See “Catholicism & Capital Punishment,” FT, April 2001.) I
cannot square that interpretation with the following passage from the
encyclical:
It is clear that, for these [permissible purposes of penal
justice] to be achieved, the nature and extent of the punishment must be
carefully evaluated and decided upon, and ought not go to the extreme of
executing the offender except in cases of absolute necessity: in other
words, when it would not be possible otherwise to defend society. Today,
however, as a result of steady improvements in the organization of the
penal system, such cases are very rare, if not practically nonexistent.
(Emphases deleted and added.)
It is true enough that the paragraph of the encyclical that precedes
this passage acknowledges (in accord with traditional Catholic teaching)
that “the primary purpose of the punishment which society inflicts is
‘to redress the disorder caused by the offense’” by “imposing on the
offender an adequate punishment for the crime.” But it seems to me quite
impossible to interpret the later passage’s phrase “when it would not be
possible otherwise to defend society” as including “defense” through the
redress of disorder achieved by adequate punishment. Not only does the
word “defense” not readily lend itself to that strange interpretation,
but the immediately following explanation of why, in modern times,
“defense” rarely if ever requires capital punishment has no bearing
whatever upon the adequacy of retribution. In fact, one might say that
it has an inverse bearing.
How in the world can modernity’s “steady improvements in the
organization of the penal system” render the death penalty less condign
for a particularly heinous crime? One might think that commitment to a
really horrible penal system (Devil’s Island, for example) might be
almost as bad as death. But nice clean cells with television sets,
exercise rooms, meals designed by nutritionists, and conjugal visits?
That would seem to render the death penalty more, rather than less,
necessary. So also would the greatly increased capacity for evil—the
greatly increased power to produce moral “disorder”—placed in individual
hands by modern technology. Could St. Paul or St. Thomas even have
envisioned a crime by an individual (as opposed to one by a ruler, such
as Herod’s slaughter of the innocents) as enormous as that of Timothy
McVeigh or of the men who destroyed three thousand innocents in the
World Trade Center? If just retribution is a legitimate purpose (indeed,
the principal legitimate purpose) of capital punishment, can one
possibly say with a straight face that nowadays death would “rarely if
ever” be appropriate?
So I take the encyclical and the latest, hot–off–the–presses version
of the catechism (a supposed encapsulation of the “deposit” of faith and
the Church’s teaching regarding a moral order that does not change) to
mean that retribution is not a valid purpose of capital punishment.
Unlike such other hard Catholic doctrines as the prohibition of birth
control and of abortion, this is not a moral position that the Church
has always—or indeed ever before—maintained. There have been Christian
opponents of the death penalty, just as there have been Christian
pacifists, but neither of those positions has ever been that of the
Church. The current predominance of opposition to the death penalty is
the legacy of Napoleon, Hegel, and Freud rather than St. Paul and St.
Augustine. I mentioned earlier Thomas More, who has long been regarded
in this country as the patron saint of lawyers, and who has recently
been declared by the Vatican the patron saint of politicians (I am not
sure that is a promotion). One of the charges leveled by that canonized
saint’s detractors was that, as Lord Chancellor, he was too quick to
impose the death penalty.
I am therefore happy to learn from the canonical experts I have
consulted that the position set forth in Evangelium Vitae and in the
latest version of the Catholic catechism does not purport to be binding
teaching—that is, it need not be accepted by practicing Catholics,
though they must give it thoughtful and respectful consideration. It
would be remarkable to think otherwise—that a couple of paragraphs in an
encyclical almost entirely devoted not to crime and punishment but to
abortion and euthanasia was intended authoritatively to sweep aside (if
one could) two thousand years of Christian teaching.
So I have given this new position thoughtful and careful
consideration—and I disagree. That is not to say I favor the death
penalty (I am judicially and judiciously neutral on that point); it is
only to say that I do not find the death penalty immoral. I am happy to
have reached that conclusion, because I like my job, and would rather
not resign. And I am happy because I do not think it would be a good
thing if American Catholics running for legislative office had to oppose
the death penalty (most of them would not be elected); if American
Catholics running for Governor had to promise commutation of all death
sentences (most of them would never reach the Governor’s mansion); if
American Catholics were ineligible to go on the bench in all
jurisdictions imposing the death penalty; or if American Catholics were
subject to recusal when called for jury duty in capital cases.
I find it ironic that the Church’s new (albeit nonbinding) position
on the death penalty—which, if accepted, would have these disastrous
consequences—is said to rest upon “prudential considerations.” Is it
prudent, when one is not certain enough about the point to proclaim it
in a binding manner (and with good reason, given the long and consistent
Christian tradition to the contrary), to effectively urge the retirement
of Catholics from public life in a country where the federal government
and thirty–eight of the states (comprising about 85 percent of the
population) believe the death penalty is sometimes just and appropriate?
Is it prudent to imperil acceptance of the Church’s hard but traditional
teachings on birth control and abortion and euthanasia (teachings that
have been proclaimed in a binding manner, a distinction that the average
Catholic layman is unlikely to grasp) by packaging them—under the
wrapper “respect for life”—with another uncongenial doctrine that
everyone knows does not represent the traditional Christian view?
Perhaps, one is invited to conclude, all four of them are recently
made–up. We need some new staffers at the Congregation of Prudence in
the Vatican. At least the new doctrine should have been urged only upon
secular Europe, where it is at home.