quotations about capital punishment
According to the L.A. Times, Attorney General John Ashcroft wants to take "a harder stance" on the death penalty. What's a harder stance on the death penalty? We're already killing the guy? How do you take a harder stance on the death penalty? What, are you going to tickle him first? Give him itching powder? Put a thumbtack on the electric chair?
JAY LENO
The Tonight Show
It is cold at six-forty in the morning on a March day in Paris, and seems even colder when a man is about to be executed by firing squad.
FREDERICK FORSYTH
The Day of the Jackal
Capital punishment kills immediately, whereas lifetime imprisonment does so slowly. Which executioner is more humane? The one who kills you in a few minutes, or the one who wrests your life from you in the course of many years?
ANTON CHEKHOV
The Bet
The hangman is a disgrace to any civilized country.
ARTHUR KOESTLER
Hanged by the Neck: An Exposure of Capital Punishment in England
Apart from the fact that the death penalty is inhumane, it is also irreversible. To reinstate the practice, if motivated by a political calculus, is particularly irresponsible.
MEENAKSHI GANGULY
Deutsche Welle, July 1, 2019
Death is not only an unusually severe punishment, unusual in its pain, in its finality and in its enormity, but it serves no penal purpose more effectively than a less severe punishment; therefore the principle inherent in the clause that prohibits pointless infliction of excessive punishment when less severe punishment can adequately achieve the same purposes invalidates the punishment.
WILLIAM J. BRENNAN
judicial opinion, Jul. 2, 1976
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?
ROGER EBERT
"Mr. Death: The Rise and Fall of Fred A. Leuchter, Jr.", Chicago Sun-Times, February 4, 2000
Most people approve of capital punishment, but most people wouldn't do the hangman's job.
GEORGE ORWELL
The Road to Wigan Pier
It's just really tragic after all the horrors of the last 1,000 years we can't leave behind something as primitive as government sponsored execution.
RUSS FEINGOLD
Chicago Tribune, November 11, 1999
Capital punishment is our society's recognition of the sanctity of human life.
ORRIN HATCH
attributed, The Cassell Dictionary of Regrettable Quotations
The man who passes the sentence should swing the sword.
DAVID BONIOFF & D.B. WEISS
"Winter is Coming", Game of Thrones
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.
RAMSEY CLARK
New York Times, Jul. 3, 1968
Ain't we in the free world
Death penalty in Texas kill young boys and girls
Barbarity, I'm in the double-R casually
Bugging how I made it out the hood, dazzle me
How far we really from third world savagery
When the empire fall, imagine how crazy that'll be
NAS
"America"
I have reached the conviction that the abolition of the death penalty is desirable. Reasons: 1) Irreparability in the event of an error of justice, 2) Detrimental moral influence of the execution procedure on those who, whether directly or indirectly, have to do with the procedure.
ALBERT EINSTEIN
Albert Einstein: The Human Side
The game never change, only the players
While some inherit castles and thrones
Some end up death bed layers
Victims of the system and stripped mentally
Hit with 25 to life or the death penalty
SHABAZZ THE DISCIPLE
"Crime Saga", Book of Shabazz (Hidden Scrollz)
There were eleven votes for "guilty." It's not easy for me to raise my hand and send a boy off to die without talking about it first.
REGINALD ROSE
Twelve Angry Men
The death penalty is like torture, a retrograde and counter-civilizing practice.
HUGH LAFOLLETTE
The Oxford Handbook of Practical Ethics
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.
MARGARET THATCHER
TV interview, A Plus 4, Oct. 15, 1984
I know something about killing. I don't like killing. And I don't think a state honors life by turning around and sanctioning killing. Now, that's just a personal belief that I have.
JOHN KERRY
Wolf Blitzer Reports, Sep. 17, 1996
Many of us do not believe in capital punishment, because thus society takes from a man what society cannot give.
KATHARINE FULLERTON GEROULD
Modes and Morals