Best 146 quotes in «death penalty quotes» category

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

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.

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 don't cut off the hands of thieves or castrate rapists. Why must we murder murderers?

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

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.

We oppose the death penalty not just for what it does to those guilty of heinous crimes, but for what it does to all of us: It offers the tragic illusiion that we can defend life by taking life.

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

What you do to these men on California's Death Row, you do to God.

To top it off, for those of you who are interested in the economics, it costs more to pursue a capital case toward execution than it does to have full life imprisonment without parole.

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

When you're talking about death, you can't afford to make even one mistake.

A sentence which might bear in mind that our great struggle is that of fear, and that if a man has killed compulsively, it is because he was extremely frightened. Above all, a justice which might examine itself, & recognize that all of us, a living quagmire, founded in darkness, & for this reason not a man's evil should be cosigned to another man's evil: so that the latter may not shoot to kill without restraint or censure. A justice which will not forget that we are all dangerous, & that at the hour when the executant of justice kills, he is no longer protecting us or seeking to eliminate a criminal; he is committing his own crime, which he has been harboring for a considerable time. At the hour of killing a criminal- at that very moment, an innocent man is being put to death. No, no, I am not asking for the sublime, nor for the things which gradually become the words which help me to sleep peacefully. Those of us who take refuge in the abstract are a mixture of forgiveness & vague charity. What I want is something much harsher & much more difficult: I want the terrestrial.

Are you the sum total of your worst acts?

A solemn day. Barring a stay by Sup Ct, & with my final nod, Utah will use most extreme power & execute a killer. Mourn his victims. Justice. [...] I just gave the go ahead to Corrections Director to proceed with Gardner's execution. May God grant him the mercy he denied his victims. [...] We will be streaming live my press conference as soon as I'm told Gardner is dead. Watch it at www.attorneygeneral.Utah.gov/live.html.

I did not see the hanging. They hanged him in front of the jail in Toronto, and You should have been there Grace, say the keepers, it would have been a lesson to you. I've pictured it many times, poor James standing with his hands tied and his neck bare, while they put the hood over his head like a kitten to be drowned. At least he had a priest with him, he was not all alone. If it had not been for Grace Marks, he told them, none of it would have happened. It was raining, and a huge crowd standing in the mud, some of them come from miles away. If my own death sentence had not been commuted at the last minute, they would have watched me hang with the same greedy pleasure. There were many women and ladies there; everyone wanted to stare, they wanted to breathe death in like fine perfume, and when I read of it I thought, If this is a lesson to me, what is it I am supposed to be learning?

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.)

In all death penalty cases, spending time with clients is important. Developing the trust of clients is not only necessary to manage the complexities of the litigation & deal with the stress of a potential execution; it's also key to effective advocacy. A client's life often depends on his lawyer's ability to create a mitigation narrative that contextualizes his poor decisions or violent behavior. Uncovering things about someone's background that no one has previously discovered--things that might be hard to discuss but are critically important--requires trust. Getting someone to acknowledge he has been the victim of child sexual abuse, neglect, or abandonment won't happen without the kind of comfort that takes hours and multiple visits to develop. Talking about sports, TV, popular culture, or anything else the client wants to discuss is absolutely appropriate to building a relationship that makes effective work possible.

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?

You can't reconcile being pro-life on abortion and pro-death on the death penalty.

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")

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

Now that is one real good feeling, to know you've got a good-sized chunk of time with somebody you love.

It would take me a long time to understand how systems inflict pain and hardship in people's lives and to learn that being kind in an unjust system is not enough.

Mom hadn't met Ramon; her advocacy was more arm's length - petitions, the website, letter writing, meetings with politicians. Her friend Hanna had formed a close friendship with Ramon though, visiting him as often as she could. Hanna told me that Ramon's greatest regret was that he wouldn't get to see his daughter grow up. And Jeremy's dad, who had that opportunity, was just throwing it away. It made me furious, and I couldn't let it go.

The State is not God. It has not the right to take away what it cannot restore when it wants to.

The primitive idea of justice is partly legalized revenge and partly expiation by sacrifice. It works out from both sides in the notion that two blacks make a white, and that when a wrong has been done, it should be paid for by an equivalent suffering. It seems to the Philistine majority a matter of course that this compensating suffering should be inflicted on the wrongdoer for the sake of its deterrent effect on other would-be wrongdoers; but a moment's reflection will shew that this utilitarian application corrupts the whole transaction. For example, the shedding of blood cannot be balanced by the shedding of guilty blood. Sacrificing a criminal to propitiate God for the murder of one of his righteous servants is like sacrificing a mangy sheep or an ox with the rinderpest: it calls down divine wrath instead of appeasing it. In doing it we offer God as a sacrifice the gratification of our own revenge and the protection of our own lives without cost to ourselves; and cost to ourselves is the essence of sacrifice and expiation.

They found him guilty, and brother, if Maine had the death penalty, he would have done the airdance before that spring's crocuses poked their heads out of the dirt.

Since governments take the right of death over their people, it is not astonishing if the people should sometimes take the right of death over governments." [On Water]

[T]here are some human rights that are so deep that we can't negotiate them away. I mean people do heinous, terrible things. But there are basic human rights I believe that every human being has. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights in the United Nations says it for me. And it says there are two basic rights that can't be negotiated that government doesn't give for good behavior and doesn't take away for bad behavior. And it's the right not to be tortured and not to be killed. Because the flip side of this is that then when you say OK we're gonna turn over -- they truly have done heinous things, so now we will turn over to the government now the right to take their life. It involves other people in doing essentially the same kind of act." (PBS Frontline: Angel on Death Row)

A humane and generous concern for every individual, his health and his fulfillment, will do more to soothe the savage heart than the fear of state-inflicted death, which chiefly serves to remind us how close we remain to the jungle.

An evil deed is not redeemed by an evil deed in retaliation.

Because the Illinois death penalty system is arbitrary and capricious - and therefore immoral - I no longer shall tinker with the machinery of death.

As a member of the New York Senate from 1966 to 1989, I voted 12 times to establish the death penalty in New York... I regret my votes in favor of the death penalty.

Capital punishment is the most premeditated of murders.

Capital punihsment: That without the Capital get the punishment.

Capital punishment is against the best judgment of modern criminology and, above all, against the highest expression of love in the nature of God.

Commute me, execute me. Don't drag it out.

As a Christian, as an individual, as a doctor, I am absolutely opposed to the death penalty.

Crime is redeemed by remorse, but not by a blow of the axe or slipknot. Blood has to be washed by tears but not by blood.

Embracing a certain quotient of racial bias and discrimination against the poor is an inexorable aspect of supporting capital punishment. This is an immoral condition that makes rejecting the death penalty on moral grounds not only defensible but necessary for those who refuse to accept unequal or unjust administration of punishment.

Eliminating the death penalty...will not hinder the prosecutorial capacity to seek, or the court's ability to impose, 'life without parole' sentences for serious, heinous crimes and criminals.

Conservatives should question how the death penalty actually works in order to stay true to small government, reduction in wasteful spending, and respect for human life.

For justice to have any meaning, it must also mean that no innocent person should ever be executed.

Evidence of innocence is irrelevant!

For whence did Dante take the materials for his hell but from this our actual world? And yet he made a very proper hell of it.

For me the hardest struggle in my faith life was the Catholic Church is against the death penalty.

From the moment you are in that cell, when they tell you you're going ot be electrocuted, you contemplate it all the time. It never leaves your mind, and they never let it leave your mind.