Howard Wilkinson Quotes

You have no idea what an appetite it gives one, being executed.

Make your way to death row and speak with the tragic victims of criminality. As they prepare to make their pathetic walk to the electric chair, their hopeless cry is that society will not forgive. Capital punishment is society's final assertion that it will not forgive.

I don't know what my Death Row meal would be. I'm surprised that people can even eat when they're on Death Row.

Condemned and executioner with aren't coupled in a primitive rite.

Most people are not affected by [the death penalty]. It's like how many people are actually sent to Iraq and Afghanistan? Such a small percentage.

That execution will take place here." She runs her fingertips over the table beneath her. "On this table. I thought it would be interesting to show you." "I knew what would happen when I came here," I say. "It's just a table. And I'd like to go back to my room now.

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

All that's missing for Utah is a blindfold and a cigarette.

The death penalty is becoming a way of life in this country.

It's absolutely clear that whatever cruel and unusual punishments may - may mean with regard to future things, such as death by injection or the electric chair, it's clear that - that the death penalty, in and of itself, is not considered cruel and unusual punishment.

Donald Beardslee is set for execution this week in California. His crimes were about twenty years ago, but it will be the first execution in California in quite some time.

I hear they burn for murder. Well, they say it just takes a second to die.

This suspense is terrible. I hope it will last.

You have been tried by twelve good men and true, not of your peers but as high above you as heaven is of hell, and they have said you are guilty. Time will pass and seasons will come and go. Spring with its waving green grass and heaps of sweet-smelling flowers on every hill and in every dale. Then sultry Summer, with her shimmering heat-waves on the baked horizon. And Fall, with her yeller harvest moon and the hills growing brown and golden under a sinking sun. And finally Winter, with its biting, whining wind, and all the land will be mantled with snow. But you won't be here to see any of 'em; not by a damn sight, because it's the order of this court that you be took to the nearest tree and hanged by the neck till you're dead, dead, dead, you olive-colored son of a billy goat.

Perchance you who pronounce my sentence are in greater fear than I who receive it.

I want to see if she is serious about the death penalty.

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

It is a miserable thing to live in suspense; it is the life of the spider.

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

I am a child of America. If ever I'm sent to Death Row for my revolutionary 'crimes,' I'll order as my last meal: a hamburger, french fries, and a coke.

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

You will be excellently executed.

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

Ten minutes can be a long time when you're waiting with a beating heart for something you don't understand, something you don't really want to know.

There's nothing worse than waiting and not knowing what'll happen to you. Your own imagination can be crueler than any captor.