Elizabeth Gilbert Quotes

It would be great to do a story and get somebody who is innocent out of jail. That's a wonderful thing.

The woman who runs the Pennsylvania Innocence Project told me that there's a man she's been trying to get out of prison for 26 years. Every night before she goes to bed, she thinks, 'What is he doing?' She says you don't sleep. And yet, she has the greatest sense of humor and this light that comes out of her.

I've never been under the illusion that everybody on death row is innocent - far from it. My own guess is upwards of 90 percent are guilty. But a ten percent error rate if that's what it is, or even five percent, is really way too high.

The death penalty scares the hell out of me. We now see about one out of eight errors in these convictions.

For 14 years, I could not find volunteer lawyers capable of providing the legal assistance I needed to prove my innocence.

I hear much of people's calling out to punish the guilty, but very few are concerned to clear the innocent.

Isn't all mankind ultimately executed for a crime it never committed?

The advent of DNA testing, and the number of convictions thrown out, has confirmed that we've put LOTS of innocent people to death. There need not be any other argument against death penalty.

Death row is a nightmare to serial killers and ax murderers. For an innocent man, it's a life of mental torture that the human spirit is not equipped to survive.

Perhaps the bleakest fact of all is that the death penalty is imposed not only in a freakish and discriminatory manner, but also in some cases upon defendants who are actually innocent.

For justice to have any meaning, it must also mean that no innocent person should ever be executed.

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.

I am not anti-death penalty, but I'm damned sure anti-the-wrong-guy-getting-executed.

Our job is to bash the President.

I ask for calm yet resolute voices to be heard in our communities. It is imperative that people of good will, those who believe in a just and fair criminal justice system, hear our voices.

Do I favor the death penalty? Theoretically, I do, but when you realize that there's a 4 percent error rate, you end up putting guilty people to death.

It has become increasingly difficult for states or the federal government to apply the death penalty. But why even try? Nothing is accomplished, and while the chances of making a mistake are now diminished - DNA can prove guilt as well as innocence - life in prison is a worthy substitute.

I represented a man on death row whose lawyers had spent all of eight hours looking into his claim of innocence. I met men whose lawyers had never looked into their backgrounds.

My first job out of law school was representing people on death row in North Carolina, where I often saw the impact of hasty prosecutions.

When I signed on to letting the death penalty back in, I thought the procedural protections against executing an innocent person were stronger than they turned out to be.

I'd like to think that if I were in prison for a crime I didn't commit, someone would be trying to get me the hell out of there.

Somebody once said that my look was like if Aileen Wuornos got acquitted and got a book deal. And I was like, 'That's wrong, but it's really funny.' And I've always thought that she was kind of like a gold mine for parody because there's all these things that went wrong in her life.

I don't believe in the death penalty. I believe that there are other people as we speak right now in prison, wrongfully accused, who could serve such a fate. That is injustice at its greatest.

I never wanted it to get to this point. I had hoped that, by its own course, by the way the media covers politics, people would open their eyes and see who Donald Trump really is. But that, unfortunately, has not happened. The polls in the early states indicate that he's been able to fool a significant number of people into believing that he is something that he is not.

Most of the outrage comes from not the public, but from the media, the press and writers.