The Death Penalty

The Pontifical Council for the Evangelization of Peoples has issued a "dossier" on the The Death Penalty.  (Go to this post, at Vox Nova, for a link to the dossier.)  The dossier (I'm quoting the VN post) "describes the various faces of capital punishment around the world, reports which nations have abolitioned its use and which maintain it, and sketches the manner in which the Church understands that biblical and historical teachings on the death penalty require the element of practical states of affairs in evaluating the moral licitness of administering the death penalty."  FYI.

The Dossier ends with this quote from the USCCB: 

“When the state in our names and with our taxes ends a human life despite having non lethal alternatives it suggests that society can overcome violence with violence. The use of the death penalty ought to be abandoned not only for what it does to those who are executed but for what it does to all of society”.

Both of these sentences are interesting.  I understand that the imposition of capital punishment could suggest, and could be taken to mean, that "society can overcome violence with violence."  It could also mean, though -- and, in my view, punishment ought to mean -- not so much that the punishment "overcome[s]" the crime, but that it expresses a moral judgment about the crime, thereby vindicating both the moral order and the dignity of the victim.  The question, it seems to me, is not whether the death penalty ("violence") "overcome[s]" homicide, but whether the death penalty is, or can be, the right vehicle for expressing the moral judgement that a just society should express in response to serious crime.