What is the new understanding that emerged about the death penalty that recently entered the Catechism?

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This is the reasoning:

This conclusion is reached taking into account the new understanding of penal sanctions applied by the modern State, which should be oriented above all to the rehabilitation and social reintegration of the criminal.

-Letter to the Bishops regarding the new revision of number 2267 of the Catechism of the Catholic Church on the death penalty

The letter goes on to state that prior Church teaching applied in "a social context in which the penal sanctions were understood differently, and had developed in an environment in which it was more difficult to guarantee that the criminal could not repeat his crime."

The CDF is basically claiming that we now know that criminal penalties are for rehabilitation and social reintegration, not for retribution, deterrence, prevention, and the like. Francis has been using this same sort of reasoning to argue against life sentences. I am not agreeing with the decision; I am only explaining the phrase.

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The strange thing about death penalty is that there is no uniformity across the nations on the crimes to which it is applicable, level of the court which is competent to award it, different authorities to whom appeal can be made, and the manner by which the convict is put to death in execution of the penalty. India, for instance, is a secular nation where death penalty is in vogue, but is to be awarded in rarest of the rare ' cases. The convict is given a fair trail, and is mandated to appeal to the Apex Court and then to seek mercy from the President . It takes years together to complete the legal process and to execute the convict, so that nothing is left to speculation that he/she had not been given a fair chance to prove innocence, or to seek a lesser penalty. Unfortunately, that is not the case with all nations across the world. A visit to the website of Amnesty International is enough to convince one that death penalty which once executed is irreversible, that many innocent people have gone to the gallows for lack of fair trial, and that a number of nations prescribe death penalty for crimes such as smuggling of drugs for which other penalties could be given. Now, one cannot expect the draft-makers of Catechism to have a quintessential summary of all the arguments for and against imposition of death penalty . Naturally, they may have chosen to limit the arguments to a few words viz. ``new understanding."

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