The Vatican’s permanent observer at the United Nations has set out the Church’s opposition to the death penalty. Here a moral theologian looks at his statement and the Church’s traditional teaching on the subject Last year, a death-row prisoner, Clayton Lockett, spent 45 minutes in apparent agony before dying of a heart attack after the state of Oklahoma used an untested combination of drugs for his execution. Similar incidents in Ohio and Arizona have brought the death penalty out of the shadows for many in the United States. They happened because since 2013 American states have been unable to obtain the chemicals typically used in executions, mainly because the European manufacturers of those drugs have refused to sell them for this purpose. States intent on carrying