This full-court Catholic press . . .

While a lot of public attention has been correctly fixed on the recent Supreme Court decision that appears to severely weaken the nation's practical commitment to an integrated school system (one can only pity the poor school district administrator charged with supporting diversity), my attention was drawn to the decision to red light the execution of a delusional inmate in Texas. According to yesterday's Washington Post:

The Supreme Court blocked the execution of a schizophrenic Texas death-row inmate Thursday in a ruling that makes it easier for mentally ill condemned prisoners to contest their death sentences.

The court ruled in 1976 that it is unconstitutional to execute an insane prisoner, but since then no death-row inmate has succeeded in overturning a death sentence based on mental illness. Thursday's ruling removed one obstacle to such claims: the fact that a prisoner's disorder might not become fully evident until after the deadline for raising constitutional appeals has passed.

By a vote of 5-4, the court said that the law does not bar consideration of a claim by lawyers for convicted murderer Scott Louis Panetti that the inmate is too delusional to understand the state's reasons for planning to put him to death — even though they waited until Panetti's execution date was set in 2003 to raise the claim.

Seems fair that if we agree as a society that it is unjust to execute the mentally ill that a timing technicality should not allow such an execution to continue. My Catholic brothers on the court did not agree, however, and voted in a dissenting bloc against the opinion, in other words that the execution should have continued.

Now as a liberal, I am used to being described as a Cafeteria Catholic by fellow Catholics who don't cotten to my tastes on church governance, transparency, celibacy, women's ordination--that's pretty much were my buffet winds away from the mainstream steam table--so I will watch with interest as these self-proclaimed conservative Catholics on the U.S. Supreme Court conduct themselves on issues that have been touched on by church teaching, such as the death penalty.

Here is the catechetical cite I respectfully offer my brothers for consideration the next time a DP issue comes up, perhaps they missed it on this one. I know they would not want to be known as buffet-browsing Catholics comme moi:

2267
Assuming that the guilty party's identity and responsibility have been fully determined, the traditional teaching of the Church does not exclude recourse to the death penalty, if this is the only possible way of effectively defending human lives against the unjust aggressor.

If, however, non-lethal means are sufficient to defend and protect people's safety from the aggressor, authority will limit itself to such means, as these are more in keeping with the concrete conditions of the common good and more in conformity with the dignity of the human person.

Today, in fact, as a consequence of the possibilities which the state has for effectively preventing crime, by rendering one who has committed an offense incapable of doing harm--without definitively taking away from him the possibility of redeeming himself--the cases in which the execution of the offender is an absolute necessity "are very rare, if not practically non-existent."