Questions
fromReaders •
Do the courts of the land have the right to inflict capital punishment on those guilty of murder?—M.W.,Washington. No individual on his own has the right to execute another person because that one has committed a murder. However, we would not say that the community could not do so, acting through its legally constituted courts of law. If a person has been given a fair trial, and irrefutable evidence has been presented that that person is a murderer, then it seems that the community must take some action to protect its citizens. We have always said that jails are not Jehovah’s means of punishment, so we would hardly be consistent in arguing that it would be more in harmony with Jehovah’s law for a murderer to be imprisoned for life than for the murderer to be put to death. Jehovah’s law on the matter was that a murderer should be punished by death, not by imprisonment. If a person is a self-confessed murderer, or has been proved to be such without any shadow of doubt, then the community must take some action against the individual, rather than let him go free to commit further crimes.
At 1 Peter 4:15 the apostle said: "Let none of you suffer as a murderer or a thief or an evildoer or as a busybody in other people’s matters." (NW) Then the apostle goes on to show that if we suffer as a Christian we should not feel shame. Peter’s words seem to imply that it was proper for a murderer to suffer for his crime, and we know what the penalty was from God’s standpoint, namely, death, and not imprisonment. Peter does not argue that a murderer should not suffer merely because no man was present to act as an appointed executioner from Jehovah. In Peter’s day the duly constituted authorities of the community were the ones who brought the suffering or punishment upon a murderer, and Peter makes no objection to this practice.
The apostle Paul also seems to take the same position, only he puts it even more clearly. Acts 25:10, 11 (NW) states: "Paul said: ‘I am standing before the judgment seat of Caesar, where I ought to be judged. I have done no wrong to the Jews, as you also are finding out quite well. If, on the one hand, I am really a wrongdoer and have committed anything deserving of death, I do not beg off from dying; if, on the other hand, none of those things exists of which these men accuse me, no man can hand me over to them as a favor. I appeal to Caesar!’" Please note that here while standing before the judgment seat of Caesar, the duly constituted authority of the community, and not an executioner appointed by Jehovah God, Paul went on record as saying that if he had done anything deserving of death, he would not beg off from dying. This certainly seems to mean that Paul considered the properly constituted civil authorities as having power to inflict the death sentence. Rather than argue that such a human court did not have this power, he seemed to indicate that it did have the power and he would not object to the exercise of that power against him if he had committed anything deserving of death; and certainly a murder is something that makes the one committing it worthy of death, according to Jehovah’s law as well as man’s law.
Hence, there does not seem to be any violation of Scriptural principle in the community’s putting a murderer to death. It even seems a more Scriptural course than committing the murderer for life, to be thereafter fed and clothed and cared for at the expense of the community, and always with the possibility that the murderer may add to his crimes by killing another inmate, or by killing guards in an attempted escape, or by escaping and murdering other persons on the outside. In the nations’ practice of capital punishment there does not seem to be anything that is contradictory to God’s law, and where the law of the land does not conflict with God’s law we do not raise particular objection against it.
Watchtower 1952 1st March pages 158-160 Questions from Readers
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