Good afternoon Mr. Chairman and members, my name is Andrew Rivas and I am the executive director of the Texas Catholic Conference. The TCC is the statewide association of the 15 Roman Catholic dioceses in our state and it is our responsibility to advocate for the public policy positions of all of the active Bishops of Texas. Thank you Mr. Chairman, and the committee, for allowing me to testify today in support of HB 819/HB 852.

The Church teaches that a properly installed government authority does God’s work when it protects its citizens and when it values life. The teaching goes all the way back to the first century but it was St Thomas Aquinas who later wrote the Church’s teaching on how a society may respond to murder. His analysis of when it is appropriate for a society to use the death penalty gives us a three-prong framework that places restrictions and safeguards on its use. The TCC supports the abolition of the use of the death penalty in our state because Texas violates all three prongs of the framework.

In order for a government to use the ultimate punishment and execute an individual, the government must:

1. …fully determine the identity of the guilty party. In other words, there can be absolutely no doubt that the person being executed actually committed the crime;
2. …fully determine the responsibility of the guilty party. In other words,  a guilty person can only be responsible for the crime he/she committed and the punishment must fit the crime; and
3. If non-lethal means are sufficient to defend and protect the community from the guilty party then government authority will limit itself to such means, as these are more in keeping with the common good and more in conformity with the dignity of the human person. In other words, in our country today we have the means, our criminal justice system, to protect society and punish the guilty so that we only resort to using the death penalty rarely, or not at all.
   
   

Now, some in this room may ask whether those who commit the most heinous crimes, such as murdering a child, constitutes the “rare” occasions when the death penalty is appropriate. According to The Gospel of Life, written by our late Pope John Paul II, the existence of a “rare” occasion when the death penalty may be used is not determined by the gravity of the crime but by whether “it would not be possible otherwise to defend society.” No matter how heinous the crime, if society can protect itself without ending a human life, it should do so. The Texas Catholic Conference supports HB 819 & HB 852 and we encourage the members of this committee to also support these bills..

Catholic Catechism 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."