Harry A. Blackmun Quotes

The death penalty experiment has failed …. I will no longer tinker with the machinery of death.

In case anybody asks you about my position on capital punishment, you can tell them I favor it.

Personally I am very much against the death penalty for several reasons.

The death penalty issue is obviously a divisive one. But whether one is for or against, you can not deny the basic illogic - if we know the system is flawed, if we know there are innocent people on Death Row, then until the system is reformed, should we not abandon the death penalty to protect those who are innocent?

When a mad man is executed, it is a miserable spectacle, both against law, and of extreme inhumanity and cruelty, and can be no example to others.

We should execute 27, or 30 or 35 people at one time.

I am a proponent of capital punishment. I am not a proponent of capital torture.

I'm always theoretically opposed to capital punishment as a matter of policy; like, I don't believe a state should put its citizens to death.

Death row prisoners face enormous challenges in finding lawyers who will assist them.

The punishment of death is the war of a nation against a citizen whose destruction it judges to be necessary or useful.

I am passionately opposed to the death penalty for anyone . . . I think, myself, that it is an obscenity . . .

I support the death penalty and will continue to do that.

The execution of William Bonin was not the traditional gas chamber of the past. That has been ruled cruel and unusual. Instead, we have something that seems very kind and benign and technical; the injection of chemicals, Nazi-style.

Remember the death penalty is murder.

Death by hanging... well, in view of the whole situation, I never expected anything different. It's all right.

Standing alone among great democratic nations in imposing the death penalty is another moral decision that Americansare being forced to confront.

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.

On his deathbed he asked for a priest and became a Catholic. That was his wife's religion. It was his own business and none of mine. If you had sentenced one hundred and sixty men to death and seen around eighty of them swing, then maybe at the last minute you would feel the need for some stronger medicine than the Methodists could make.

The death penalty? Give me a break. It's easy. Abortion? Absolutely easy. Nobody ever thought the constitution prevented restrictions on abortion. Homosexual sodomy? Come on. For 200 years, it was criminal in every state.

I didn't just see myself as a film director here [in Life And Nothing More], but also as an observer of people who had been condemned to death.

I will not leave you until I have seen you hanged.

I regard the death penalty as a savage and immoral institution that undermines the moral and legal foundations of society.

We shouldn't have all these campaigns to get the Birmingham Six released if they'd been hanged. They'd have been forgotten and the whole community would be satisfied.

Our emotions may cry for vengeance in the wake of a horrible crime, but we know that killing the criminal will not undo the crime, will not prevent similar crimes by others, does not benefit the victim, destroys human life and brutalizes society. If we are to still violence, we must cherish life. Executions cheapen life.

Hanging was the worst use a man could be put to.