LENITATIS DEFECTUS. - Although the Latin term l. d. is suited to signify any pronounced lack of clemency, gentleness, mildness, sweetness, etc., nevertheless in its technical sense in the CIC and therefore among moralists it now has (in the old legislation the meaning was somewhat broader) exclusively the meaning given 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)
(not excluding immediate voluntary cooperators). These two irregularities (v.) ex defectu, supposing that no grave sins are attached to them (since then one would enter the domain of crime), constitute the l. d.
Exempt from this, however, are not only jurors who in reality do not give a death sentence (D. Prümmer holds the contrary opinion), and, at least with great probability, one who issued a death sentence that was in fact not carried out, but also anyone who carried out the sentence under inescapable command (as, for example, happens with soldiers who carry out capital sentences of the military authority), remote cooperators, and one who killed in war or in legitimate self-defense. It is nevertheless indispensable, for the case of l. d. to obtain, that the causes producing it have been placed by a validly baptized subject (canonists call it l. d. christianae). From can. 983, as interpreted by jurisprudence, it follows that those who have incurred l. d. can neither receive Orders nor exercise them.
Bibliography4 works
Lorenzo Simeone