More on the death-penalty for child rape

Thanks to Tom for his reply.  His points strike me as sound and sensible.  And yet . . .  It continues to seem to me -- and this is a comment directed more to the Catechism than to Tom -- that the Church's statements on the death penalty not entirely clear about the death penalty as punishment.  I worry that the statements about the death penalty seem to assimilate that question to the questions of, e.g., lethal force in self-defense, and killings in (just) wars. 

As a matter of punishment theory, though, I believe that what justifies the public authority in "punishing" (and, "punishing" is not co-extensive with "constraining the liberty of") a person is not a desire, or a presumed need, to "protect society" from the offender.  (It is not "punishment", in my view, merely to identify someone who is thought to be dangerous and to incapacitate that person.  We *could* do that, and use our criminal-law apparatus to do it, but doing it would not, in my view, be well regarded as "punishing".)

Now, as Tom points out, the Catechism also has the more traditional language (e.g., "redress", "disorder", etc.) suggesting a retributive (properly understood) theory of punishment.  asks whether the death penalty.  I would like a careful discussion -- in a future edition? or have I just missed it -- of why, exactly, the execution of an offender cannot serve, in fact, to "redress" the "disorder" introduced by the offense.  Or, we might say that executions cannot "redress" the "disroder" (in homicide or rape cases) because the public authority's actions have simply lost whatever capacity they might once have had to "carry moral meaning", as the Church's traditional punishment theory required.  Or, perhaps the idea is that a categorical prohibition on killings that are not necessary for self-defense also constrains the universe of available state-imposed punishments.  If that's the answer, fine.  But, this answer would (it seems to me) depart more dramatically from the Church's traditional teaching on punishment.

Now, all that said, I think we should abandon capital punishment.  I'm agin' it.  But, I do think a lot about the expressive, pedagogical, moral function of punishment . . .