Capital Punishment Quotes

Isn't all mankind ultimately executed for a crime it never committed?

Capital punishment would be more effective as a preventive measure if it were administered prior to the crime.

It is better and more satisfactory to acquit a thousand guilty persons than to put a single innocent one to death.

If I were asked to chose between execution and life in prison I would, of course, chose the latter. It's better to live somehow than not at all.

I think more people would be alive today if there were a death penalty.

Murder and capital punishment are not opposites that cancel one another, but similars that breed their kind. It is the deed that teaches not the name we give it.

Capital punishment turns the state into a murderer. But imprisonment turns the state into a gay dungeon-master.

If we believe that murder is wrong and not admissible in our society, then it has to be wrong for everyone, not just individuals but governments as well.

I personally have always voted for the death penalty because I believe that people who go out prepared to take the lives of other people forfeit their own right to live. I believe that that death penalty should be used only very rarely, but I believe that no-one should go out certain that no matter how cruel, how vicious, how hideous their murder, they themselves will not suffer the death penalty.

Capital punishment is our society's recognition of the sanctity of human life.

Most people approve of capital punishment, but most people wouldn't do the hangman's job.

Capital punishment? It makes no sense as a policy: It's not a deterrent, and economically it's a disaster. It's very clear that there are innocent people on death row. And if I put an innocent person to death, that's murder.

I think capital punishment works great. Every killer you kill never kills again.

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

Executing a murderer is the only way to adequately express our horror at the taking of an innocent life. Nothing else suffices. To equate the lives of killers with those of victims is the worst kind of moral equivalency. If capital punishment is state murder, then imprisonment is state kidnapping and restitution is state theft.

I don't think you should support the death penalty to seek revenge. I don't think that's right. I think the reason to support the death penalty is because it saves other people's lives.

We don't know if capital punishment is a deterrent, but we know that men we execute will not murder again.

I don't know if the question is whether you believe in capital punishment anymore. I think the greater question is its effectiveness and given the choices we face in California, should we have a merit-based discussion on its effectiveness and costs?

I want to think that there are better ways of obviating murder than to resort to capital punishment, but I realise that this may be wishful thinking on my part.

But now inquiry is being made concerning these issues. First, can any believer enlist in the military? Second, can any soldier, even those of the rank and file or lesser grades who neither engage in pagan sacrifices nor capital punishment, be admitted into the church? No on both counts.

Supporters of capital punishment bear a special responsibility to ensure the fairness of this irreversible punishment.

The existence of the soldier, next to capital punishment, is the most grievous vestige of barbarism which survives among men.

Ninety countries still hold on to capital punishment, and, sadly, one of these is the United States, the only Western industrialized country to practice this barbaric punishment.

One area of law more than any other besmirches the constitutional vision of human dignity. . . . The barbaric death penalty violates our Constitution. Even the most vile murderer does not release the state from its obligation to respect dignity, for the state does not honor the victim by< emulating his murderer. Capital punishment's fatal flaw is that it treats people as objects to be toyed with and discarded. . . . One day the Court will outlaw the death penalty. Permanently.

The true, unacknowledged purpose of capital punishment is to inspire fear and awe -- fear and awe of the State.

Capital punishment has probably been responsible for a good deal of human progress. The overwhelming majority of those executed were of the sort whose departures for bliss eternal improved the average intelligence and decency of the race.

Any man knows when he is justified, and all the wits in the world cannot enlighten him on that point. The murderer always knows that he is justly punished; but when a government takes the life of a man without the consent of his conscience, it is an audacious government, and is taking a step towards its own dissolution.

The death penalty is a poor person's issue. Always remember that: after all the rhetoric that goes on in the legislative assemblies, in the end, when the deck is cast out, it is the poor who are selected to die in this country.

I remember on page one of The New York Times the article about Fred Leuchter. The heading was "Can Capital Punishment Be Humane" and it was the story about an electric chair repairman and execution machine designer. And then buried in the back of the paper was the fact that Fred Leuchter had also been involved in holocaust denial.

Bertrand Russell used to employ the method of "evidence against interest"; in other words of deciding that a critique of capital punishment, say, carried more weight if it came from a prison governor. (My friend John O'Sullivan puts it like this: If the pope says he believes in God, he's only doing his job; if he says he doesn't believe in God, he may be on to something.)

I have been brought up in a culture where capital punishment is indeed anathema. I have always thought of myself as a principled opponent to capital punishment. However, when thinking about how the topic is handled in other cultures, in particular the American, Russian and Chinese ones, I have realised that my own tack on the issue was utterly superficial.

Any assassination is an assassination. It's cold, it's terrible. I'm against any capital punishment. Only the Lord has the right to take away life because he's the giver of life. And assassination stands against democracy, against civilization, against a civilized life of people. Alas, the situation in Lebanon is very chaotic and many innocent people lost their lives because they have a state within a state, an army within an army and the respect for life is not high enough.

But once a culture develops sufficiently to become skeptical, the idea of censorship becomes less attractive. To suppress a book or a picture or a sculpture or a play or a film is a terrible act of aggression against the artist who created it. This is a miming of capital punishment; it destroys the life that has been emanated by a life.

I have been reluctant to lobby on other issues I most care about - nuclear weapons (against), religion (atheist), capital punishment (anti), AIDS (fund-raiser) because I don't want to be forever spouting, diluting the impact of addressing my most urgent concern - legal and social equality for gay people worldwide.

I have come to think that capital punishment should be abolished.

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

I have yet to see a death case among the dozen coming to the Supreme Court on eve-of-execution stay applications in which the defendant was well represented at trial... People who are well represented at trial do not get the death penalty.

Many that live deserve death. And some that die deserve life.

The reality is that capital punishment in America is a lottery. It is a punishment that is shaped by the constraints of poverty, race, geography and local politics.

Capital punishment is the most premeditated of murders.

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

Returning violence for violence multiplies violence, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars.

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.

The second item in the liberal creed, after self-righteousness, is unaccountability. Liberals have invented whole college majors--psychology, sociology, women's studies--to prove that nothing is anybody's fault. No one is fond of taking responsibility for his actions, but consider how much you'd have to hate free will to come up with a political platform that advocates killing unborn babies but not convicted murderers. A callous pragmatist might favor abortion and capital punishment. A devout Christian would sanction neither. But it takes years of therapy to arrive at the liberal view.

While the Church exhorts civil authorities to seek peace, not war, and to exercise discretion and mercy in imposing punishment on criminals, it may still be permissible to take up arms to repel an aggressor or to have recourse to capital punishment. There may be a legitimate diversity of opinion even among Catholics about waging war and applying the death penalty, but not however with regard to abortion and euthanasia.

Opponents of capital punishment argue that the state has no right to take a murderer's life. Apparently, one fact that abolitionists forget or overlook is that the state is acting not only on behalf of society, but also on behalf of the murdered person and the murdered person's family.

Of all parties I now see only one party- The Anarchist- which respects human life, and loudly insists upon the abolition of capital punishment, prison torture and punishment of man by man altogether.

Let us leave the EEC, abolish human rights laws, take TV sets, pool tables and phones out of prisons, bring back corporal and capital punishment, slash benefits and put single mothers into hostels instead of giving them council flats. Finally, if we chucked out all the illegal immigrants and asylum seekers there would be enough jobs for everyone.

It is significant that, as innocent babies are killed, and capital punishment is withheld from their murderers, the same men who plead for the murderer's life also demand the “right” to abortion. Usually, the same picketers that carry a sign one day, “Abolish Capital Punishment,” also carry “Legalize Abortion” another day. When this is called to their attention, their answer is, “There is no contradiction involved.” They are right: the thesis is “condemn the innocent and free the guilty.

The ability of so many people to live comfortably with the idea of capital punishment is perhaps a clue to how so many Europeans were able to live with the idea of the Holocaust: Once you accept the notion that the state has the right to kill someone and the right to define what is a capital crime, aren't you halfway there?