Death Penalty

[Aloysius]

you mean Bush the governor. anyway, yeah, that's great. that's why the Church should have more temporal power, the state can't cure criminals and it basically knows it.

opposing the death penalty does not have its root in spiritual thinking, however. It began to be questioned at the Enlightenment when people started thinking of death as the final end and thus there is never any reason to end mortal life.

The Church has always seen certain grave crimes as making a person deserve death. And it has always seen the threat of death as the ultimate conversion method. Many a man (I would argue probably more than those in life imprisonment) has been driven to repentance when faced with their own mortality.

The state has just recourse to the DP for capital crimes.

[argent_paladin]

The traditional teaching of the Church does not exclude, presupposing full ascertainment of the identity and responsibility of the offender, recourse to the death penalty, when this is the only practicable way to defend the lives of human beings effectively against the aggressor. If, instead, bloodless means are sufficient to defend against the aggressor and to protect the safety of persons, public authority should limit itself to such means, because they better correspond to the concrete conditions of the common good and are more in conformity to the dignity of the human person. Today, in fact, given the means at the State's disposal to effectively repress crime by rendering inoffensive the one who has committed it, without depriving him definitively of the possibility of redeeming himself, cases of absolute necessity for suppression of the offender today ... are very rare, if not practically non-existent.'
CCC

Note, it mentions the responsibility of the offender. Age is a factor in ascertaining responsibility. And a society should be consistent. If we as a society don't believe that a person is responsible enough to vote until 18, join the military, make contracts, etc then why do we believe that he is responsible enough to be executed for his crimes?
Of course, to be totally consistent, if a 17-year-old is not capable of making a rational decision to kill another with full volition (and thus doesn't deserve death) then why is a 17-year-old deemed capable of making a rational decision to kill another with full volition when that other is her unborn child? Why are the rules different for a 14-year-old girl who has an abortion than a 17-year-old who kills someone?
Bottom line: Society has the right to decide when a person takes on the rights and responsibilities of adulthood. There is reasonable scientific evidence that 18 is a good dividing line between legal minority and majority in our society.

[MichaelFilo]

Yes, and science itself says that each human is unique, and while 18 can be a good age at which we call a person an adult, and give them the responsibilities of that position, many people are adults much earlier. If you can commit premedated murder, you're an adult and in court should be treated as such. Gaining the privelages of an adult doesn't make you anymore an adult then hitting a certain age. Some 20 year olds are more childish then I am, some 14 year olds are more mature than I can ever hope to be. While witholding privelages is an understandable practice, witholding punishment is not, since the punishment must fit the crime.

God bless,
Mikey