Best 146 quotes in «death penalty quotes» category

Now let me get this straight. Bush is anti-abortion, but pro-death penalty. I guess it's all in the timing, huh?

Of one thing, however, I am certain. Just as an execution without adequate safeguards is unacceptable, so too is an execution when the condemned prisoner can prove that he is innocent. The execution of a person who can show that he is innocent comes perilously close to simple murder.

Other states are trying to abolish the death penalty... mine's putting in an express lane.

Our ancestors... purged their guilt by banishment, not death. And by so doing, they stopped that endless vicious cycle of murder and revenge.

People who are well represented at trial do not get the death penalty.

Personally I am very much against the death penalty for several reasons.

Our law is a Jordanian law that we inherited, which applies to both the West Bank and Gaza, and sets the death penalty for those who sell land to Israelis.

Perhaps the bleakest fact of all is that the death penalty is imposed not only in a freakish and discriminatory manner, but also in some cases upon defendants who are actually innocent.

The court was not previously aware of the prisoner's many accomplishments. In view of these, we see fit to impose the death penalty.

The costs can't be borne by smaller counties particularly, so if the crime occurs in a large county you might be charged with the death penalty, in a smaller county you're not. That raises some significant questions about fairness.

Sometimes you just have the thin the herd.

Standing alone among great democratic nations in imposing the death penalty is another moral decision that Americansare being forced to confront.

That led me to say that when push comes to shove, I'm against capital punishment.

The abolition of the death penalty is making us a civilized society. It shows we actually do mean business when we say we have reverence for life.

The attorney general doesn't favor one method or the other, he favors the death penalty.

The death penalty can be tolerated only by extreme statist reactionaries who demand a state that is so powerful that it has the right to kill.

The death penalty experiment has failed.

The death penalty has succeeded in America, not in spite of Christians, but because of us. The Bible Belt is the Death Belt. Wherever Christians are most concentrated is where executions are happening, and that's deeply troubling to me.

The death penalty is inhumane... whether that person is in a [jail] or it's bin Laden.

The death penalty only should be - if you agree with it, which I don't, only allowed for murder. You have to murder someone to get the death penalty.

The death penalty doesn't need your assent to continue ... it needs your indifference.

The death penalty is reserved for people who do not

The death penalty is no more effective a deterrent than life imprisonment... It is also evident that the burden of capital punishment falls upon the poor, the ignorant and the underprivileged members of society.

The death sentence is a barbaric act . . . It is a reflection of the animal instinct still in human beings.

The death penalty serves no one. It doesn't serve the victims. It doesn't serve prevention. It's truly all about retribution....There comes a time when you have to ask if a penalty that is so permanent can be available in such an imperfect system. The only guarantee against executing the innocent is to do away with the death penalty.

The death penalty would be even more effective, as a deterrent, if we executed a few innocent people more often.

The death sentence is a barbaric act.

The death penalty is being applied in the United States as a fatal lottery.

The death penalty makes us all murderers.

The death penalty symbolizes whom we fear and don't fear, whom we care about and whose lives are not valid.

The more you look at the death penalty, that's where you see that we're actually not killing the worst of the worst. We're killing the poorest of the poor. Where actually one of the biggest determinants of who gets executed is how many resources they have to defend themselves.

The fanatic has the courage of his conviction and the intolerance of his courage. He is opposed to the death penalty for murder, but he would willingly have anyone electrocuted who disagreed with him on the subject.

The pacifist is as surely a traitor to his country and to humanity as is the most brutal wrongdoer.

The same divine authority that forbids the killing of a human being establishes certain exceptions, as when God authorizes killing by a general law or when He gives an explicit commission to an individual for a limited time.

The punishment of murder by death is contrary to reason, and to the order and happiness of society, and contrary to divine revelation.

There has never been any evidence that the death penalty reduces capital crimes or that crimes increased when executions stopped. Tragic mistakes are prevalent...It is clear that there are overwhelming ethical, financial, and religious reasons to abolish the death penalty.

There's a second life involved. No matter what your position is on abortion or the death penalty, you shouldn't put a pregnant woman to death.

The taking of life is too absolute, too irreversible, for one human being to inflict on another, even when backed by legal process. Where the death penalty persists, conditions for those awaiting execution are often horrifying, leading to aggravated suffering.

The victims of crime have been transformed into a group oppressively burdened by a system designed to protect them.

To condemn someone to death is to surrender; it proves that you failed. You are not able to change him, to change her; you have to kill him or her. You surrender. ... You only demonstrate your lack of capacity, your helplessness. This is failure.

To take a life when a life has been lost is revenge, not justice.

The system is not perfect. Until it's perfect, let's do away with the death penalty.

We have a legal system, and we have a penal code. We have the death penalty in Saudi Arabia, and people should respect this.

We have abolished the death penalty for humans, so why should it continue for animals?

We need to acknowledge that the death penalty is broken beyond repair.

Are you the sum total of your worst acts?

Gates got up, but not fast or jerkily, with the same slowness that had always characterized him. He wiped the sweat off his palms by running them lightly down his sides. As though he were going to shake hands with somebody. He was. He was going to shake hands with death. He wasn't particularly frightened. Not that he was particularly brave. It was just that he didn't have very much imagination. Rationalizing, he knew that he wasn't going to be alive anymore ten minutes from now. Yet he wasn't used to casting his imagination ten minutes ahead of him, he'd always kept it by him in the present. He couldn't visualize it. So he wasn't as unnerved by it as the average man would have been. ("3 Kills For 1")

I also think of those daily slaughters along the highways, of that death that is as horrible as it is banal and that bears no resemblance to cancer or AIDS because, as the work not of nature but of man, it is an almost voluntary death. How can it be that such a death fails to dumbfound us, to turn our lives upside down, to incite us to vast reforms? No, it does not dumbfound us, because like Pasenow, we have a poor sense of the real, and in the sur-real sphere of symbols, this death in the guise of a handsome car actually represents life; this smiling death is con-fused with modernity, freedom, adventure, just as Elisabeth was con-fused with the Virgin. This death of a man condemned to capital punishment, though infinitely rarer, much more readily draws our attention, rouses passions: confounded with the image of the executioner, it has a symbolic voltage that is far stronger, far darker and more repellent. Et cetera. Man is a child wandering lost—to cite Baudelaire`s poem again—in the "forests of symbols." (The criterion of maturity: the ability to resist symbols. But mankind grows younger all the time.)

It cannot be denied that in cases of child rape the question of consent cannot arise at all, simply because a child or worst still an infant lacks mental power or knowledge to provide “consent” or even lacks physical ability to restrain. Moreover such an act subjects the child/infant to physical trauma, leading to even physical , mental and psychological ailment. To eliminate the horror from the face of the earth, I firmly believe we need to accept capital punishment as an apt punishment for subjecting a child to such a ordeal

I think he killed someone already. Capital offense an’ all that.” Bailey tilted her head to one side. “That’s something that never made sense to me,” she said. “What?” “The death penalty. I mean, how does killing someone prove that killing people is wrong?