Best 146 quotes in «death penalty quotes» category

My main area of activism is the death penalty, and it will continue to be once this crisis is over with.

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.

My overriding belief is that it is always possible for criminals to improve and that by its very finality the death penalty contradicts this.

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.

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.

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

Sometimes you just have the thin the herd.

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.

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

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 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.

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

The death penalty is reserved for people who do not

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

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 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 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 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.

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.

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

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

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.

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 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?

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 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.

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.

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

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

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

Are you the sum total of your worst acts?