The Death Penalty and Imago Dei

Last month I had a very interesting conversation with Mirror of Justice blogger and law professor Susan Stabile about the death penalty. She was kind enough to respond on a variety of helpful levels and post the discussion (here and here) on MOJ. You can read the exchanges, but the upshot is that most of the legal scholarship that I've seen from a Christian (primarily Roman Catholic) perpsective rests its opposition to the death penalty in the fact that we are created in God's image, and as such, have an inherent dignity with which the death penalty is inconsistent.

As you can see from the discussion, God's delegation of the authority to humans to carry out the death penalty is itself rooted in the imago Dei (Genesis 9:6). It seems to me that since the death penalty was established to vindicate the inherent dignity of the human person as created in God's image, there is more to be proved by death penalty opponents than simply that we are created in God's image.