Wayne Allard Quotes
I support public hanging for its deterrent effect.
Wayne Allard, U. S. Congressman (Democrat, CO), 1996, Quoted on PBS The News Hour with Jim Lehrer, August 20, 2007
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
He was one of the longest serving District Attorneys in America, He also served the largest jurisdiction of a District Attorney. When he first was elected DA of Manhattan there were over 600 murders a year. When he retired, there were only about 60, a 90% reduction. Yet, his experience was that capital punishment was useless in deterring murder. He had many other techniques far more effective.
Sherman was distressed at the full due process and trials that had to be given to Confederate spies and guerrillas and wanted to execute them quickly as an example. He complained to the Judge Advocate General that his men were “losing prisoners in the swamp” which both of them realized meant the immediate execution of prisoners by soldiers and junior officers which Sherman did not like either. The Lincoln administration insisted on the full due process. Even after conviction, President Abraham Lincoln tended to pardon many of the condemned.
Livermore's argument fell on deaf ears, and the amendment was passed over the objection of a few arch-conservatives.
The capital punishment debate was raging in Europe. Belgium and parts of Switzerland had just abolished the death penalty.
The most common example that capital punishment does not work as a deterrent is that while thieves were being hung for their crime, other thieves would circulate among the watching crowd at the scaffold and pickpocket the observers.
Wade was urging the Prince to abolish the Death by 1000 Cuts {641825} and simply rely on beheading the form of execution for “lesser” crimes. Note that the Prince’s fears and arguments parallel the same given by modern proponents of the Death Penalty—without it criminals would not be controlled and instability would ensue.
There was, and still is in some parts of the world, this belief taht one of the main reasons for capital punioshment with visible and public executions was to deter others from comitting crimes by seeing the example of what happens to the transgressors. For these people, exemplified by this quotation of Dr. Johnson's, public executions are crime prevention. This notion tirned out to have been a fallacy. In England they found that during every public hanging, skilled pickpockets would steal from the onlookers who were tranfixed on the macabre secene--this despite the fact that pickpocketing was a hanging offence.
Alan Wayne Allard is an American veterinarian and a Republican Party politician who served as a United States Senator and United States Representative from Colorado, as well as a member of the Colorado Senate. He did not seek re-election to the U.S. Senate in 2008. Since February, 2009, he has worked at The Livingston Group, a Washington D.C. lobbying firm.
