quotations about capital punishment
In the disposition of capital cases in the United States, the median elapsed time between sentence and execution is approximately seventeen months.... However, even an attorney of moderate talent can postpone doomsday year after year, for the system of appeals that pervades American jurisprudence amounts to a legalistic wheel of fortune.
TRUMAN CAPOTE
In Cold Blood
Every murder proves that hanging is not altogether deterrent; every hanging, that it is somewhat deterrent--it deters the person hanged. A man's first murder is his crime, his second is ours.
AMBROSE BIERCE
A Cynic Looks at Life
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?
MARGARET ATWOOD
Alias Grace
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.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW
Androcles and the Lion
The Holy Psychiatrist, 4th Disciple and Killah Priest
Unlimited volts of energy striking the enemy
The righteous vicinity, death be the penalty
SHABAZZ THE DISCIPLE
"Sunz of Man Court"
If you would take a man's life, you owe it to him to look into his eyes and hear his final words. And if you cannot bear to do that, then perhaps the man does not deserve to die. A ruler who hides behind paid executioners soon forgets what death is.
GEORGE R. R. MARTIN
A Game of Thrones
The death penalty is not about whether people deserve to die for the crimes they commit. The real question of capital punishment in this country is: Do we deserve to kill?
BRYAN STEVENSON
Just Mercy
Adopt the euthanasian method of electricity, asphyxia by smothering in rose-leaves, or slow poisoning with rich food, and the death penalty may come to be regarded as the object of a noble ambition to the bon vivant, and the rising young suicide may go and kill somebody else instead of himself, in order to receive from the public executioner a happier dispatch than his own 'prentice hand can assure him.
AMBROSE BIERCE
A Cynic Looks at Life
If we could do away with death, we wouldn't object; to do away with capital punishment will be more difficult. Were that to happen, we would reinstate it from time to time.
JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE
Wilhelm Meister's Travels
But here I should imagine the most terrible part of the whole punishment is, not the bodily pain at all--but the certain knowledge that in an hour, then in ten minutes, then in half a minute, then now--this very instant--your soul must quit your body and that you will no longer be a man.
FYODOR DOSTOYEVSKY
The Idiot
I believe ... that while all human life is sacred there's nothing wrong with the death penalty if you can trust the legal system implicitly, and that no one but a moron would ever trust the legal system.
NEIL GAIMAN
American Gods
If we are to abolish the death penalty, I should like to see the first step taken by my friends the murderers.
ALPHONSE KARR
Les Guêpes, Jan. 31, 1849
In the case of murder, the death penalty -- issued by way of putting the culprit to sleep to then apply the lethal injection -- is the time delayed procedure of self-defense as carried out by the representatives of the victim(s) who, at the time of the incident and due to the then existing circumstances, was/were unable to defend itself/themselves from the willful murderous attack.
MANFRED F. SCHIEDER
Ayn Rand, I and the Universe
Without knowing it the girl was arguing on the side of the world's expert criminologists, who hold that to destroy an offender cannot benefit society so much as to redeem him.
L. FRANK BAUM
The Flying Girl
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.
GUY DE MAUPASSANT
"Sur L'eau"
"Down with the gallows!" is a cry not unfamiliar in America. There is always a movement afoot to make odious the just principle; of "a life for a life"--to represent it as "a relic of barbarism," "a usurpation of the divine authority," and the rest of it. The law making murder punishable by death is as purely a measure of self-defense as is the display of a pistol to one diligently endeavoring to kill without provocation. It is in precisely the same sense an admonition, a warning to abstain from crime. Society says by that law: "If you kill one of us you die," just as by display of the pistol the individual whose life is attacked says: "Desist or be shot." To be effective the warning in either case must be more than an idle threat. Even the most unearthly reasoner among the anti-hanging unfortunates would hardly expect to frighten away an assassin who knew the pistol to be unloaded.
AMBROSE BIERCE
A Cynic Looks at Life
I support the death penalty. I think that it has to be administered not only fairly, with attention to things like DNA evidence, which I think should be used in all capital cases, but also with very careful attention. If the wrong guy is put to death, then that's a double tragedy. Not only has an innocent person been executed but the real perpetrator of the crime has not been held accountable for it, and in some cases may be still at large. But I support the death penalty in the most heinous cases.
AL GORE
presidential debate, Oct. 17, 2000
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.
STEPHEN KING
Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption
For budget hawks, the death penalty is a gaping money hole. Capital cases typically cost millions of dollars each, and yet nearly half of the death sentences in Pennsylvania are later overturned because of legal error.
DANIEL FILLER
The Philadelphia Inquirer, June 17, 2019
If Jesus had been killed twenty years ago, Catholic school children would be wearing little electric chairs around their necks instead of crosses.
LENNY BRUCE
attributed, The Ultimate Book of Quotations