Thomas Jefferson Quotes

Before we snap to judge someone who's done a horrible crime, is it possible that all of us in the worst possible circumstances could be capable of something like that? So it's about not judging people before really considering what the circumstance was and that not all murderers are created equal. We have a tendency in our society to just say murder? Cut and dried. Go away forever. Or maybe you should have the electric chair yourself.

For centuries the death penalty, often accompanied by barbarous refinements, has been trying to hold crime in check; yet crime persists. Why? Because the instincts that are warring in man are not, as the law claims, constant forces in a state of equilibrium.

Laws undertake to punish only overt acts.

The liberation of those who commit murder and terrorism is unacceptable.

A murderer is regarded by the conventional world as something almost monstrous, but a murderer to himself is only an ordinary man. It is only if the murderer is a good man that he can be regarded as monstrous.

I love criminal law. It must be the Dostoyevskian streak in me. I'm fascinated by the accumulation of forces that make people behave in ways that everybody else hates.

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

Every unpunished murder takes away something from the security of every man's life.

God himself instituted capital punishment as a remedy for certain crimes, at the very least murder…All life is so sacred that anyone who takes it is required to pay the same penalty.

Those responsible for social insecurity will receive harsher punishment

What then is capital punishment but the most premeditated of murders, to which no criminal's deed, however calculated it may be, can be compared? For there to be an equivalence, the death penalty would have to punish a criminal, who had warned his victim of the date at which he would inflict a horrible death on him, and who from that moment onward had confined him at his mercy for months. Such a monster is not encountered in private life.

In a civilized society, all crimes are likely to be sins, but most sins are not and ought not to be treated as crimes.

The greater the number of laws and enactments, the more thieves and robbers there will be.

Abstractly considered, the hanging of the gamblers at Vicksburg was of little consequence. They constitute a portion of the population that is worse than useless in any community; and their death, if no pernicious example be set by it, is never a matter of reasonable regret with any one. If they were annually swept from the stage of existence by the plague or smallpox, honest men would perhaps be much profited by the operation.

If any one bring an accusation of any crime before the elders, and does not prove what he has charged, he shall, if it be a capital offense charged, be put to death.

Why should not insolvent Thieves be rather punished with slavery then death? so as being slaves they may be forced to as much labour, and as cheap fare, as nature will endure, and thereby become as two men added to the Commonwealth, and not as one taken away from it;

No legislation can suppress nature …. We can refuse to brand an act of nature as a crime, and to impute to vice what is due to ignorance.

I'd rather lock somebody up and throw away the key and put them in hard labor, the ultimate penalty that the law will allow, but I'm opposed to the death penalty

They could hang people for what's in there.

Most states in the union where the death penalty is theoretically on the books don't have executions.

My nation wants the death penalty. That is the decision of the Grand National Assembly of Turkey.

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

The death penalty question should be put on the agenda in Hungary.

If the desire to kill and the opportunity to kill came always together, who would escape hanging?

It is well-nigh obvious that those who are in favor of the death penalty have more affinities with murderers than those who oppose it.