Pope Francis pushed Catholics to abolish death penalty in U.S.

Last week, the Catholic Church lost its faithful pastor and visionary leader. And the world lost its most persuasive champion to end the scourge of capital punishment, wrote Krisanne Vaillancourt Murphy in The Vatican News.

I remember exactly where I was when Pope Francis addressed the U.S. Congress in September of 2015. I had just deboarded my train arriving at Penn Station in New York. Standing inside the station and watching the simulcast, I was transfixed by the live feed, hanging on to the Holy Father’s every word.  

Pope Francis called on Americans to embrace our highest ideals and to pursue the common good. Yet no line touched me as powerfully as when he made a specific call to end the death penalty in the United States.

It was a powerful, historic moment. Pope Francis was the first Pope to formally address Congress, seizing this opportunity to single out an issue that, for many, still resided within a loophole of disclarity on the continuum of life issues.

Abolitionists cheered, while supporters of the death penalty pushed back. This moment was significant in 2015, but it is only now, after Pope Francis’ passing, that we can fully grasp its importance.

Pope Francis gave Congress, and us, a glimpse into one of the central tenets of his papacy—prophetic and unequivocal action against the death penalty, including and especially promoting its abolition in the United States.

The Catholic Church has long seen the death penalty as incompatible with the consistent ethic of life. In the United States, the injustice is compounded by widespread racial bias, grotesque botched executions, an arbitrary and capricious application, and the reality that innocent people have been sentenced to death.

It is therefore not surprising that Pope Francis would challenge Americans to end this unjust practice. As the head of the universal Church, Pope Francis was also thinking globally. In 2015, global executions were at a 25-year high. American abolition would send a message to the international community setting a key precedent for other nations to follow suit.

Through his congressional address, the Pope sought to inspire the millions of American Catholics, who comprise 22% of the U.S. population, to drive this push for abolition. The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops and my organization, Catholic Mobilizing Network, were already working hard to advance key arguments against the death penalty and break through the polarization that divides American Catholics.

With countless Catholic public servants in key positions, a new openness to hearing the moral and practical arguments against the death penalty could prove decisive.

Following his 2015 visit, and throughout the next presidential administration, Pope Francis continued to take unparalleled action. He revised the death penalty section of the Catholic Catechism, the core teaching of the Catholic Church, calling the practice “inadmissible” in all cases.

The Pope’s adjustment to Church teaching was a natural progression in line with his predecessors’ efforts to expand the protection of human life, but it was also bold and absolute, eliminating any ambiguity about the Church’s position and contributing to real change; four states abolished the death penalty in four consecutive years—with Catholics playing a central role in these efforts in New Hampshire and Virginia.

At the same time President Trump reinstated federal executions in 2020, Pope Francis released his third encyclical, Fratelli tutti, which included a section decrying the injustice of the death penalty and calling for its worldwide abolition. The encyclical affirmed the Catechism revision, placing the full weight of Pope Francis’ teaching authority behind the Church’s anti-death penalty position.

Furthermore, the Holy Father sent letters to U.S. Presidents and Governors asking them to commute their death rows; he sent thank-you letters when they did; and he even dedicated a Church-wide month of prayer to the goal of global abolition.

In this historic Jubilee Year 2025, Pope Francis called Catholics around the world to “be one in demanding dignified conditions for those in prison, respect for their human rights and above all the abolition of the death penalty, a provision at odds with Christian faith and one that eliminates all hope of forgiveness and rehabilitation.”

And in the final days of the Biden Administration, in his weekly Angelus on December 8, 2024, Pope Francis stood before the world and urged federal death row commutations in the United States. Later that month, President Joe Biden commuted the sentences of 37 of the 40 people on death row. No president in the history of the United States had ever taken such an action.

For Pope Francis’ legacy to be fully realized, American Catholics and all who admire the Pope’s courageous moral leadership must continue to pursue human dignity.

Will we rise to this challenge by abolishing the death penalty, and honoring the legacy of a Pope who believed in our capacity for mercy?

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Mangino discusses his book The Executioner's Toll, 2010 on Killer Psychologist podcast

Great to join Dr. Dana Anderson and Dr. Craig Wetter on the Killer Psychologist podcast discussing my book The Executioner's Toll, 2010.

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Justice Jackson says attacks on judiciary are designed to undermine the rule of law

 Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson warned that the Trump administration’s attacks on the judiciary are “not isolated incidents,” but are designed to intimate the judiciary and “impact more than just the individual judges who are being targeted,” reported Jurist. Justice Jackson further warned that the threats and harassment of the judiciary are an attack on US democracy and “ultimately risk undermining our Constitution and the rule of law.”

Jackson added:

I am taking this point of personal privilege to reaffirm the significance of judicial independence and to denounce attacks on judges based on their rulings. A society in which judges are routinely made to fear for their own safety or their own livelihood due to their decisions is one that has substantially departed from the norms of behavior that govern in a democratic system. Attacks on judicial independence are how countries that are not free, not fair, and not rule-of-law-oriented operate.

Quoting former Justice Stephen Breyer, Jackson stated that judicial independence “is a matter of custom, habit, and institutional expectation,” which requires support not just from the judiciary itself, but from the community in which judges serve. Jackson also recalled that it is “easier to dismantle judicial independence than to attain it.”

Jackson then offered two ideas to ensure that judicial independence is preserved to protect the Constitution and the US public. First, Jackson recommended that judges take a more active role in educating citizens about what the judiciary does, and the importance of the role of judges in defending the Constitution and the rule of law. Toward this end, Jackson reminded that judges throughout the First Circuit are already engaged in civic education and community outreach work. Jackson credited Breyer again for his remarks on civic education and noted the useful insights given by Breyer on what can be said to help the citizenry “understand the connection between judicial independence and their own wellbeing.”

Jackson’s second suggestion is simply that judges “look inward and focus on supporting one another during these challenging times…and continually reminding ourselves of the core values that guide us in our daily work.” Acknowledging the stress that comes along with deciding a difficult case “in the spotlight and under pressure,” Jackson asked judges to look for strength in their historical role models who have faced similar challenges and navigated them with “duty, honor, and a clarity of conscience.” Jackson reminded everyone of the civil rights and Brown v Board of Education era, when lower federal court judges Frank Johnson and Skelly Wright—facing threats, public insults, and private violence in their communities—joined others in striking down bus-segregation and school-segregation and continued to issue integration orders. Jackson also spoke of lower federal court Judge John Sirica, who presided over cases related to the Watergate scandal during the Nixon Administration and who disregarded the political ramifications of his ruling, followed the facts and the law, and ruled against the very party who appointed him to the bench.

Jackson asked judges to think of these and other courageous role models in their own lives to draw inspiration and encouragement to stay on course and do the right thing for the good of the country.

The Trump administration has been noted from the very inception of his second term of consistently defying court orders and proceeding to carry on business as usual. Last month, federal judge John McConnell Jr. accused the Trump administration of defying his order requiring the federal government to release billions of dollars in federal grants after Trump’s attempt to freeze federal aid funding. Earlier this month, federal judge James Boasberg ordered the Trump administration to explain the deportation of more than 200 alleged Venezuelan gang members under the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 despite his previous order not to do so.

The US Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit had already made note of these actions of defiance and reminded the Trump administration to reciprocate judicial respect for the executive with its own respect for the courts. The Trump administration’s attacks on judges have also prompted Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts to speak out against the president in March.

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Florida executes man who slaughtered a mother and her three young children

 The 15th Execution of 2025

Jeffrey Hutchinson an Army combat veteran whose Gulf War experience triggered severe mental problems was executed May 1, 2025 in Florida for the 1998 shotgun slayings of his girlfriend and her three young children, reported The Associated Press.

Hutchinson, 62, was pronounced dead at 8:15 p.m. following a lethal injection at Florida State Prison near Starke. He was the fourth person executed this year in the state under death warrants signed by Gov. Ron DeSantis, with a fifth execution set for May 15.

Hutchinson had no last statement but appeared to be mumbling to himself as the procedure started just before 8 p.m. His legs shook sporadically, and he seemed to have body spasms for several minutes and then was still. The process took a little more than 15 minutes.

The execution was carried out soon after the U.S. Supreme Court rejected a final appeal without comment.

Hutchinson had long claimed that he was innocent and that two unknown assailants perpetrated the killings under a U.S. government conspiracy aimed at silencing his activism on claims including Gulf War illnesses involving veterans. Hutchinson served eight years in the Army, part of it as an elite Ranger.

Court records, however, showed that on the night of the killings in Crestview, Hutchinson argued with his girlfriend, 32-year-old Renee Flaherty, then packed his clothes and guns into a truck. Hutchinson went to a bar and drank some beer, telling staff there that Flaherty was angry with him before leaving abruptly.

A short time later, a male caller told a 911 operator, “I just shot my family” from the house Hutchinson and Flaherty shared with the three children: 9-year-old Geoffrey, 7-year-old Amanda, and 4-year-old Logan. All were killed with a 12-gauge shotgun that was found on a kitchen counter. Hutchinson was located by police in the garage with a phone still connected to the 911 center and gunshot residue on his hands.

Darran Johnson, the brother of Renee Flaherty, said after the execution that justice was done but the family’s pain will never end.

“Not a day goes by that we don’t think about the loved ones that were taken from us,” Johnson said.

At his 2001 trial, Hutchinson’s defense was based on his claim that two unknown men came to the house and killed Flaherty and the children after he struggled with them. A jury found him guilty of four counts of first-degree murder, and he received life in prison for Flaherty’s killing and three death sentences for the children.

Hutchinson filed numerous unsuccessful appeals, many focused on mental health problems linked to his Army service. In late April his lawyers sought to delay his execution by claiming he was insane and therefore could not be put to death.

Bradford County Circuit Judge James Colaw rejected that argument in an April 27 order.

“This Court finds that Mr. Hutchinson’s purported delusion is demonstrably false. Jeffrey Hutchinson does not lack the mental capacity to understand the reason for the pending execution,” the judge wrote.

In their court filings, Hutchinson’s lawyers said he suffered from Gulf War Illness — a series of health problems stemming from the 1990-1991 war in Iraq — as well as post-traumatic stress disorder and paranoia related to his claim that he was targeted by government surveillance.

Florida’s lethal injection protocol uses a sedative, a paralytic and a drug that stops the heart, according to the state Department of Corrections.

So far this year, 15 people have been put to death in the U.S. including Hutchinson.

A fifth Florida execution is scheduled May 15 for Glen Rogers, who was convicted of killing a woman at a motel in 1997. Rogers also was convicted of another woman’s murder in California and is believed by investigators to have killed others around the country.

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Trump administration removes surgeon general's warning of gun violence as health emergency--47,000 died from firearms in 2023

 The Trump administration has removed the former surgeon general Vivek Murthy’s advisory on gun violence as a public health issue from the US Department of Health and Human Services’ website. This move was made to comply with Donald Trump’s executive order to protect second amendment rights, a White House official told the Guardian.

The “firearm violence in America” page, where the advisory had been posted, was filled with data and information about the ripple effects of shootings, the prevalence of firearm suicides and the number of American children and adolescents who have been shot and killed. Now, when someone reaches the site they will be met with a “page not found” message.

When it was originally released last summer, Murthy’s advisory was met with praise from violence prevention and research groups, and was lambasted by second amendment law centers and advocacy groups that argued the Biden administration was using public health as a cloak to push forward more gun control.

“This is an extension of the Biden Administration’s war on law-abiding gun owners. America has a crime problem caused by criminals,” the National Rifle Association (NRA) said in a statement posted to X on 25 July 2024.

But Daniel Semenza, a firearm violence researcher with Rutgers University, argues that talking about gun violence through a public health lens is meant to “bring the heat down” about a deeply politicized issue and broaden what prevention can look like.

In 2023, nearly 47,000 people died by firearms, most of them suicides.

“When people read gun violence is a public health problem, they read guns are a public health problem,” Semenza said. “This idea actually removes the politics from the issue and is an engine to get us on the same page. [The removal] feels like an unnecessary and mean-spirited way to politicize something that people have actively been trying to bring people together on.”

The removal of Murthy’s advisory and the rest of the information on the page is one of the thousands of pieces of health information and research removed from federal websites. They include information about vaccines, health risks among youth and gender-based violence, the New York Times reported.

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Trump is challenging 'fundamental structures of American democracy in a way that has never been seen before'

 Charlie Savage for The New York Times:

Nearly every president has pushed the bounds of executive power to try to achieve something specific. And a handful of presidents who took office during a true national crisis, like the Civil War or the depths of the Great Depression, swiftly made a series of legally aggressive moves to grapple with the challenges facing the country.

But the sheer volume and intensity of the power grab President Trump has undertaken in the first 100 days of his second term — an assault on legal constraints untethered to any equivalent catastrophe — is unlike anything the United States has experienced.

“They are trying to do a moonshot on executive power,” said Jack Goldsmith, a Harvard Law School professor and senior Justice Department official in the George W. Bush administration.

The rule of law in the United States has been traditionally understood to use checks and balances to prevent too much concentration of arbitrary executive power. But the maximalist cascade in the early days of Mr. Trump’s second term is testing the fundamental structures of American democracy in a way that has never been seen before.

Mr. Trump, pursuing a confrontational style of presidential politics, has unleashed an assault on counterweights to his authority: attacking judges, sidelining Congress’s role in making decisions about taxes and spending, steamrolling internal limits on the executive branch and using the levers of government to try to force outside centers of power like law firms and universities to submit to his will.

Akhil Reed Amar, a Yale Law School professor, said the broader picture was of an administration that was “proudly lawless and anti-law.” The danger, he added, “is that Trump is the most powerful person in the world, and he does not seem to be very good at restraining himself and he’s not getting any younger.”

In a recent interview with Time magazine, Mr. Trump was repeatedly pressed on his attempts to increase presidential power. While his answers largely meandered off topic, he denied that he was expanding executive authority, said he was deploying power as it was meant to be used and claimed an electoral mandate for his actions.

“I think I’m using it properly, and I’m also using it as per my election,” he said.

Yet Mr. Trump has flaunted his disrespect for the other branches of government. When it comes to the courts, he has denounced judges who rule against him and called for their impeachment while his administration has exploited loopholes and sidestepped complying with some of their injunctions.

He and the president of El Salvador all but openly mocked a Supreme Court order to facilitate the return of a man who was deported to a Salvadoran prison despite an immigration judge’s order not to send him there, acting as though bringing him back was impossible. Mr. Trump’s appointees fired a prosecutor because he spoke candidly to a judge about that mistake.

When critics accuse Mr. Trump of being too aggressive in his use of executive power, his team dodges the question of whether he is abusing his authority by stating that the power legally exists. But the administration is also pushing to change mainstream understandings to expand the authorities available to him.

For example, Mr. Trump has repeatedly challenged the power of the legislative branch. He unilaterally dismantled agencies Congress has said shall exist as a matter of law. And he fired civil servants, inspectors general and independent agency heads in defiance of job protections lawmakers wrote into statutes.

His goal appears to be to get the Supreme Court’s conservative majority to strike down those statutes and enshrine into law the so-called unitary executive theory. Developed by the Reagan administration’s legal team, the theory is a revisionist interpretation of the Constitution. It would undercut the power of Congress to structure the government and expand presidential power, rendering the executive branch more comprehensively subject to Mr. Trump’s whims.

Mr. Trump has also assumed some of the traditional constitutional control delegated to lawmakers over decisions about government spending and taxation. He froze the expenditure of funds that Congress appropriated, and he unilaterally imposed taxes on almost all imported goods from around the world.

Mr. Trump claimed the power to institute those sweeping tariffs by invoking a 1977 emergency powers law that allows him to impose economic sanctions to address an “unusual and extraordinary threat” from abroad. That law does not mention tariffs and has never been used in that way before.

Scholars of presidential power can identify seeds for some of Mr. Trump’s moves in precedents set by past presidents, but they expressed shock at the number of contestable actions he has initiated and the aggressive use to which he has put them. Many of his executive orders, they say, are difficult to connect to mainstream understandings of the law.

“We’ve been for a long time marching toward greater executive power and more feckless Congresses — Republicans and Democrats both, but a couple things seem to be different here,” said Michael W. McConnell, a Stanford law professor and a former federal appeals court judge appointed by Mr. Bush.

“One is just the volume — it’s an incredible spate of activity on all kinds of different fronts, and at some point volume begins to have a qualitative feel to it,” he said. “The second is that it seems to me that a lot of it is being done with much less legal care. Every president makes mistakes, but there has been a lot more sloppiness and I just can’t believe they could possibly have been approved by the Office of Legal Counsel.”

That office, an arm of the Justice Department, has traditionally been the center of executive branch lawyering and acted as an internal check on the presidency. It decides which proposed actions would be lawful or go too far, including vetting the legal and factual claims in draft executive orders before approving them. But Mr. Trump has largely sidelined it.

Control over legal vetting of Mr. Trump’s actions has shifted to inside the White House and the orbit of his most influential policy aide, Stephen Miller. While not a lawyer, Mr. Miller has played a key role in legal staffing decisions and has advanced a view that because presidential elections are conducted nationally, Mr. Trump embodies democratic legitimacy far more than lawmakers or judges.

“The whole will of democracy is imbued into the elected president,” Mr. Miller told reporters in February.

That perspective has bled into legal filings. One spurned a judge’s demand for information about the administration’s decision to finish transferring a group of Venezuelan migrants to a Salvadoran prison under a wartime law, the Alien Enemies Act, despite his order to turn the planes around. The judge should back off, the administration insisted, claiming that Mr. Trump wields “plenary authority” over the matter derived from the Constitution and the “mandate of the electorate.”

The administration made that claim as part of an unusually aggressive invocation of the state secrets privilege, a power the executive branch can use to prevent the exposure of sensitive national security information in court. Typically, presidents used it only for classified information, which they showed to judges in private. Neither is the case in the current clash.

Mr. Trump appears to see even less reason for self-constraint than in his first term. His hammerlock has only tightened over the Republican Party, which in turn controls the legislative branch, meaning he has no fear of impeachment. One Republican senator, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, recently admitted that “we are all afraid” of Mr. Trump.

He has also been unleashed in part thanks to the Supreme Court, whose six Republican appointees last year granted presidents broad immunity from prosecution for crimes committed using their official powers, especially in their interactions with the Justice Department.

The president, far more than in his first term, has cast aside a post-Watergate norm that the White House should stay out of law enforcement decisions. After years of baselessly accusing Barack Obama and Joseph R. Biden Jr. of directing investigations into him, he has made a reality the very weaponization of the Justice Department he once railed against.

Already, Mr. Trump has ordered prosecutors to scrutinize a top cybersecurity aide during his first term, Christopher Krebs, who fell from his favor by contradicting conspiracy theories that voting machines had been hacked to rig the 2020 election in favor of Mr. Biden.

Mr. Trump directed a similar review by the Department of Homeland Security into Miles Taylor, another first-term official who criticized him. And last week, Mr. Trump ordered the Justice Department to scrutinize ActBlue, the Democratic Party’s top fund-raising platform.

Mr. Trump is turning the department into his personal instrument in other ways, installing his own defense lawyers as its leaders. Among other actions, they dropped a corruption case against Mayor Eric Adams of New York in what a U.S. attorney denounced as an unethical abuse of law enforcement power to coerce his help in enacting the president’s deportation agenda. The move prompted a wave of resignations by prosecutors.

It is too early to know how the system will stand up to this broad and multifaceted effort to concentrate greater power over the government and American society in Mr. Trump’s hands.

At the moment, Congress is providing no check on him. If Democrats retake the House in the 2026 midterm elections, they could start trying to perform oversight or conduct impeachment hearings. Still, after the 2018 midterms, Mr. Trump vowed to stonewall their subpoenas. And while the House twice impeached him, Senate Republicans protected him from conviction.

Several judges have started to raise the possibility of holding Trump administration officials in contempt for defying their orders. But courts generally must rely on the Justice Department to prosecute criminal contempt. Even if a judge appointed a special prosecutor, the department controls federal marshals and prisons, and Mr. Trump could pardon a defendant.

The Supreme Court has yet to rule on the merits of any of Mr. Trump’s moves. But in recent weeks, the justices issued an extraordinary order to block, for now, further deportations under the Alien Enemies Act even though the department said there were no plans for any. Some observers have interpreted the apparently 7-to-2 vote as a sign that a majority of the justices are skeptical that the administration can be trusted.

Professor Amar pointed to another guardrail that appears to be somewhat effective: the financial markets, whose negative reaction to Mr. Trump’s tariff policies and the prospect that the president would fire the Federal Reserve chair seem to have prompted him to pull back.

But most of what the president is doing is not subject to market feedback.

When Mr. Trump was blowing through norms in his first term, Professor Goldsmith argued against alarmism, saying that institutional constraints would hold. But, he says, matters are “much more precarious this time” because Congress has been doing nothing to curb the White House and Mr. Trump has neutralized internal checks on the executive branch.

“That is massively different, and it just leaves the courts out there by themselves with civil society,” he said. “The administration hasn’t crushed them yet, but they are trying to. I definitely think this situation is a much more dangerous threat to the rule of law than the last time.”

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Mangino talks celebrity crime with Sierra Gillespie on Law & Crime's 'Scandal'

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