Best Death Penalty Quotes

There may be times when we are powerless to prevent injustice, but there must never be a time when we fail to protest.

The death penalty is used in such a blatantly racist way in the United States. There is no way that can be defended under any kind of definition of justice by anybody.

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

If we are to abolish the death penalty, I should like to see the first step taken by our friends the murderers.

For centuries the death penalty, often accompanied by barbarous refinements, has been trying to hold crime in check; yet crime persists. Why? Because the instincts that are warring in man are not, as the law claims, constant forces in a state of equilibrium.

Capital punishment is the most premeditated of murders.

If the law imposed the death penalty for parking tickets, we’d not only have fewer parking tickets, we’d also have much less driving.

If Jesus had been killed twenty years ago, Catholic school children would be wearing little electric chairs around their necks instead of crosses.

As if one crime of such nature, done by a single man, acting individually, can be expiated by a similar crime done by all men, acting collectively.

When we don’t fund Child Protective Services, there are consequences for all of us. Violence manifests itself. Mental health services in Texas are extremely poor. The answer is not to wait until they do something to get them help.

I think the death penalty’s easier than life in prison.

I think capital punishment’s day is done in this country. I don’t think it’s fairly applied.

A reform in the system of criminal jurisprudence, by which the death penalty shall no longer be inflicted . . . and by which our so-called prisons shall be virtually transformed into vast reformatory workshops, from which the unfortunate may emerge to be useful members of society, instead of the alienated citizens they now are.

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

If a Muslim becomes a non-Muslim and propagates his/her new religion, then it is as good as treason. There is a Death Penalty in Islam for such a person.

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

Our legal system, including the police, is anti-Dalit and anti-poor. The death penalty laws’ wrathful majesty, in blood-shot equality, deals the fatal blow on the poor not the rich, the pariah not the brahmin, the black not the white, the underdog not the top dog, the dissenter not the conformist. . . The law barks at all but bites only the poor, the powerless, the illiterate, the ignorant.

What says the law? You will not kill. How does it say it? By killing!

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.

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.

I am in favour of capital punishment if the execution of the sentence is immediate. The purpose of the death penalty is to send out a message to society.

I am constantly amazed by man’s inhumanity to man.

It is well-nigh obvious that those who are in favor of the death penalty have more affinities with murderers than those who oppose it.

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.

After years spent in Washington, I have become more aware than ever of the government’s ineptness and the likelihood of its making mistakes. I no longer trust the U.S. government to invoke and carry out a death sentence under any conditions.

In Texas, we have the death penalty, and we use it. That’s right. If you come to Texas and kill somebody, we will kill you back.

The Golden Rule reminds us of our responsibility to protect and defend human life at every stage of its development. This conviction has led me, from the beginning of my ministry, to advocate at different levels for the global abolition of the death penalty.

It’s not about whether you are innocent or guilty. It’s about whether or not you can prove you’re innocent. If you can’t prove you’re innocent, then you’re considered guilty. It’s been flipped: Now it’s guilty until proven innocent.

I think [the death penalty is] very expensive, and the delays are inordinate, delaying closure for the victims’ families.

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.

It’s strange when they near your cell. You lose all your strength, and you are like this. You lose all your strength as if a rope is dragging it out of you. Then the footsteps stop in front of another solitary confinement cell, and when you hear the sound of the key turning you feel relieved.

They sensed that what had happened around them and in their presence, and in them, was irrevocable. Never again could it be cleansed; it would prove that man, the human species – we, in short – had the potential to construct an enormity of pain, and that pain is the only force created from nothing, without cost and without effort. It is enough not to see, not to listen, not to act.

It’s very rare that someone gets the death penalty for charges of conspiracy, for his influence, for his Svengali-Rasputin act.

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

May the death penalty, an unworthy punishment still used in some countries, be abolished throughout the world.