Russ Feingold Quotes

The calculated killing of a human being by the state involves, by its very nature, an absolute denial of the executed person's humanity. The most vile murder does not, in my view, release the state from constitutional restraint on the destruction of human dignity.

The death penalty is inhumane... whether that person is in a [jail] or it's bin Laden.

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

Capital punishment is the most premeditated of murders.

Assassination on the scaffold is the worst form of assassination.

The sole motivating factor behind the death penalty is vengeance, not justice, and I firmly believe that a government that forbids killing among its citizens should not be in the business of killing people itself.

Remember the death penalty is murder.

The death penalty can be tolerated only by extreme statist reactionaries who demand a state that is so powerful that it has the right to kill.

Something about Texas I'm not proud of is that our state murdered 37 people last year alone.

I feel capitol punishment is dooming U.S.A.

Capital punishment...treats members of the human race...as objects to be toyed with and discarded.

I want to accelerate, not slow down, the enforcement of the death penalty in Florida.

The death penalty makes us all murderers.

The death sentence is a barbaric act.

With every cell of my being and with every fiber of my memory I oppose the death penalty in all forms. I do not believe any civilized society should be at the service of death. I don't think it's human to become an agent of the angel of death.

Requiring that an execution be relatively painless...actually undermines the very premise on which public approval of the retribution rationale is based.

I am more optimistic though, that this court will eventually conclude that the effort to eliminate arbitrariness while preserving fairness in the infliction of [death] is so plainly doomed to failure that is - and the death penalty - must be abandoned altogether. I may not live to see that day, but I have faith that eventually it will arrive.

We're also the only country that has the Death Penalty. That's something to boast about, isn't it?

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.

Yesterday afternoon 247 Spanish and Canary Island prisoners were decapitated. Today all the Spaniards and Canary Islanders who were sick in the hospital were decapitated, constituting the last of all those included in the order of Your Excellency.

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.

If we as a society are willing to take human life, then we should be willing to watch it being taken.

I tell myself that I had simply better accept the fact that the death penalty is here to stay in our society, at least for a while, and there is nothing I can do about it. Maybe, in time- after how many executions? - people will come to realize the futility of randomly selecting a few people to die each year.

By requiring that an execution be relatively painless, we necessarily protect the inmate from enduring any punishment that is comparable to the suffering inflicted on his victim. This trend, while appropriate and required by the Eighth Amendment's prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment, actually undermines the very premise on which public approval of the retribution rationale is based.