LENITATIS DEFECTUS. — Although the Latin term l. d. may be understood to signify any pronounced lack of clemency, gentleness, meekness, sweetness, etc., in the technical sense, however, in the CIC and consequently among moral theologians, it now has (in the former legislation the meaning was somewhat broader) exclusively the significance assigned to it by can. 984 nn. 6 and 7. According to that canon, the judge who has pronounced a death sentence and the executioner who carried it out are irregular ex defectu (the term l. d. is absent from the CIC)
(including their immediate voluntary co-operators). These two irregularities (v.) ex defectu, provided that no grave guilt is attached to them (for then the matter would enter the sphere of crime), constitute l. d.
Exempt from this impediment, however, are not only jurors who in fact do not pronounce a death sentence (D. Prümmer holds the contrary opinion), and, at least in all probability, one who pronounced a death sentence that was not actually carried out, but also anyone who carried out the sentence under an unavoidable command (as, for example, occurs with soldiers who carry out capital sentences of the military authorities), remote co-operators, and anyone who killed in war or in legitimate self-defence. It is nevertheless indispensable, for the case of l. d. to exist, that the acts producing it have been performed by a validly baptized person (canonists call it l. d., christianae). From can. 983, as interpreted by jurisprudence, it follows that those who have incurred l. d. may neither receive Orders nor exercise them.