www.catholic.com/qa/is-death-penalty-unjust-preemptive-strike
Question:
I can’t kill a man just because he might attack me later, so why does the church allow the death penalty?
Answer:
No, the death penalty is punishment for the grave wrongdoing someone has done, not for what society anticipates they will do. Some argue that the death penalty also prevents a person from committing another capital crime—thus the term capital punishment. But that’s not the fundamental basis for the application of the death penalty going back to biblical times (Gen. 9:6; Rom. 13:4). It was just retribution for the grave wrongdoing a person committed. So its application is not a preemptive strike.
For more on the death penalty, see these articles by Edward Feser, Tom Nash, Jimmy Akin and Edward Peters.
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