There are good arguments for the cessation of the death penalty but the weakest, it seems to me, is equating its very existence with a thirst for vengeance. One can easily imagine a society dispassionately choosing to assign death as the punishment for murder since there's obviously logic to it.
I think it was Chesterton who said that children long for justice and adults for mercy - about which there's a temptation to say that's because children are innocent and are more sinned against than sinning and adults tend to be manipulative and shady and more sinning than sinned against. Certainly the most innocent among us, unborn children murdered in abortion, are the most sinned against. One might think it's in the self-interest of the guilty to want mercy and for the innocent to long for justice. Which is why the figure of the innocent Christ forgiving his enemies is so startling and foreign to us. Thinking of our enemies as patients in need of healing rather enemies to be destroyed is difficult, to put it mildly.
The Pope recently made casual reference to Rev 6:10 in which the martyrs thirst for justice:
And they cried with a loud voice, saying, "How long, O Lord, holy and true, dost thou not judge and avenge our blood on them that dwell on the earth?"Taking a book of the bible out of context isn't smart, let alone a passage from a book, but that sounded out of tune with the vision of mercy presented in the New Testament. (Full disclosure: as one not suffering persecution I cannot imagine what they went through and therefore can't imagine the solace the Book of Revelation was for them.) So I went to the scriptural commentaries, which fleshed out this difference between vengeance and justness:
The Navarre commentary has it:
The martyrs' song is a clamour for justice: our Lord refers to it in the Gospel (Lk 18:7) and it echoes the aboriginal lament raised at Abel's death. What the martyrs say seems to be at odds with Christ's prayer on the cross and Stephen's on the eve of his martyrdom but there is really no contradiction. "This prayer of the martyrs", St. Thomas says, "is nothing other than their desire to obtain resurrection of the body and to share in the inheritance of those who will be saved, and their recognition of God's justice in punishing evildoers."From the Jerome biblical commentary
This cry does not express a desire for vengeance, which would not be in accord with the teaching of Christ (Lk 6:27f.). The marytrs call for the securing of justice. God would not be just, nor the Lord of history, if he did not punish injustice. The context and the recollections of the OT show that the souls are imploring God rather than Christ.From Haydock's Commentary:
These holy souls, who had been slain for the word of God, do not beg the Almighty to revenge their blood, through any hatred to their enemies, but through the great zeal which they were animated, to see justice of God manifested: that by this severity they might be moved to fear him, and be converted to him. Thus in Scripture we often read of the prophets beseeching the Almighty to fill their enemies with confusion, to humble them, etc...
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