Teleforum

Can Catholic judges, consistently with their faith, participate in death penalty cases? Faithful Catholics who have considered the question in recent decades have reached different conclusions. In 1998, Judge Amy Barrett, then a law clerk on the D.C. Circuit, co-authored an article concluding that it is immoral under Church teaching to directly participate in executions in a modern society with a functional prison system. Accordingly, she concluded that Catholic trial judges cannot in good conscience issue a death sentence and have an obligation to recuse themselves from the sentencing phase of capital trials. Appellate judges, on the other hand, need not recuse themselves in capital cases, because they do not directly issue death sentences. Justice Antonin Scalia took a different view. In a 2002 article, he asserted that if the death penalty were immoral under Church teaching, he could not participate in capital cases and would have an obligation to resign from the Supreme Court. But because he believ