Jodi Picoult Quotes

The death penalty is discriminatory and does not do anything about crime.

The death penalty does absolutely nothing to deter crime.

I do not believe that these executions made us safer. Certainly I do not believe they made us more noble.

I believe that people would be alive today if there were a death penalty.

It is the crime not the scaffold which is the disgrace.

Criminals are punished, that others may be deterred.

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

I support public hanging for its deterrent effect.

No punishment has ever possessed enough power of deterrence to prevent the commission of crimes.

It [the death penalty] is a phony issue. To pretend the death penalty is going to end crime in the United States is to fool people, to promote public ignorance.

The death penalty serves social justice.

In executing prisoners we merely add to the number of untimely dead without diminishing the number of murders committed.

The system of death-penalty justice is compromised and inequitable.

For me, the ethical arguments that resonate strongest are the ones that oppose the death penalty.

I prefer a prison full of criminals than a graveyard full of innocent people.

The death penalty, I think, is a terrible scar on American justice, especially the concept of equal justice under law, but also of due process. And it goes state by state, and it's different in different states.

Everybody believes that capital punishment is wrong, but when they look at certain cases, they're quick to say, 'Put them to death,' or scream 'capital punishment.'

Death is not only an unusually severe punishment, unusual in its pain, in its finality and in its enormity, but is serves no penal purpose more effectively than a less severe punishment.

I am against the death penalty.

Countries and states which have capital punishment have a much higher rate of murder and crime than countries that do not, so that makes sense to me, and the moral question - I struggle with it morally.

I don't believe in killing people. I believe in locking you up for the rest of your life.

Our criminal justice system is fallible. We know it, even though we don't like to admit it. It is fallible despite the best efforts of most within it to do justice. And this fallibility is, at the end of the day, the most compelling, persuasive, and winning argument against a death penalty.

The practice of executing such offenders is a relic of the past and is inconsistent with evolving standards of decency in a civilized society.

Execution as punishment is barbaric and unnecessary.

First of all, it does not deter crime, the death penalty.