LENITATIS DEFECTUS. — Although the Latin term *l. d.* may be used to signify any pronounced lack of clemency, gentleness, mildness, suavity, etc., in technical usage within the *Codex Iuris Canonici* (CIC) and thus among moralists, it now has (in the older legislation the acceptance was somewhat broader) exclusively the meaning given it by can. 984 nn. 6 and 7. According to this canon, a judge who has pronounced a death sentence and the executioner who carries it out (not excluding immediate voluntary accomplices) are irregular *ex defectu* (the term *l. d.* is absent from the CIC).
These two irregularities (v.), *ex defectu*, provided that no serious guilt is attached (for then one would enter the realm of crime), constitute *l. d.*
However, those exempt from this charge include not only jurors who in fact do not pronounce a death sentence (D. Prümmer holds a contrary opinion), and, with great probability, whoever pronounced a death sentence that was not actually carried out, but also anyone who executes a sentence under an inescapable command (as, for example, soldiers who carry out capital sentences of military authority), remote accomplices, and those who kill in war or in legitimate self-defense. It is nonetheless indispensable, for the case of *l. d.* to obtain, that the causes producing it be placed by a subject validly baptized (canonists call this *l. d. christianae*). From can. 983, as interpreted by jurisprudence, it follows that those who incur *l. d.* cannot receive Holy Orders nor exercise them.