I was born and raised Catholic, and despite the bizarre pronouncements of our current pope, my personal feeling is that capital punishment should be on the table for any crime in which the victim would have been justified in resisting with lethal force. This includes rape or aggravated sexual assault.
You're right that corruption is a human issue; indeed, I've used the following analogy with the Catholic Church before and will repeat it here.
Imagine a little town with one or two intersections and four-way stops at each. The local cops and city fathers are as corrupt as can be. They and their friends run the stop signs with impunity. People on their sh!t-list, or people from out of town are stopped and ticketed even if they come to complete stops and obey the traffic rules.
The maladministration and corruption do not in any way invalidate the idea of having stop signs at intersection. The concept, and ideal are good, positive and healthy. The grotesque abuse of power by those entrusted with it is the problem. The solution is not to get rid of the stop signs or the intersections, but to purge the corrupt individuals.
I like that criteria.