John Grisham Quotes

It costs more money to put a person on death row than it does to lock them up for the rest of their lives because of attorney fees.

Death Row inmates are almost twice as expensive to house each year as other inmates. Death penalty trials are much costlier than trials where execution is not a potential punishment and consume more time from judges, public defenders, and other legal personnel.

Costly jail calls and high commissary fees have forced families to choose between paying their bills and talking to their loved ones who are serving time, adding further costs to an already difficult situation.

It costs $30,000 to $50,000 per year to send someone to jail. You don't have to pay so much to send someone to school at Johns Hopkins.

Our proclivity for incarceration costs American taxpayers about $80 billion a year. And that doesn’t count the vast indirect costs visited upon the incarcerated, their families and communities.

It would be too great an effort and expense to send troops to Barbary. It is both easier and cheaper to pay tribute to the savages, even if it should be necessary to double or triple our tribute payments.

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

L. Ram Saran Das was sentenced to death in 1915, and the sentence was later commuted to life transportation. Today myself, sitting in the condemned cell, I can let the readers know as authoritatively that the life-imprisonment is comparatively a far harder lot than that of 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 believe that the death penalty is an effective penalty.

The death penalty in the U.S. has become a political tool - and it should never be that.

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.

My personal view is that I am opposed to the death penalty.

States without the death penalty have had consistently lower murder rates. And national murder rates have declined steadily since 1992, despite fewer executions.

Older prisoners are more expensive for prisons to house because they tend to require more health care over time.

I was put on death row because of hate.

I spend thousands of dollars on lawyers every day just to make sure that I'm not gonna go to jail.

So the chances of you being sentenced to Death Row in America is roughly the same as you winning the lottery.

I had decided on L.A. because I felt like I could handle the cost of living out there. It was just too difficult in San Francisco and New York.

I believe life imprisonment is far worse than the death penalty.

A defendant can use discovery to run out the clock on the plaintiff and to make the plaintiff run out of money.

Being on death row has taken so much from me as a human being.

In death row every rule in society is flipped.

Personally, I am opposed to capital punishment. . . . If there were some way devised to prevent . . . the extension of executive clemency to men who are sent up for life, if there were some way to keep them in for life, then I believe the public would be satisfied with the abolition of capital punishment. . . . In 1907 I was appointed to prosecute a man for one of the foulest cases of wife murder that I ever knew. . . . When the jury went out the first ballot was eleven for hanging and one for life imprisonment. . . . The second ballot was twelve for life imprisonment. . . . It is not seventeen years since I tried that case and yet this man is walking the streets to-day a free man by the action of some subsequent governor of Indiana, who pardoned or paroled over my protest. There will either have to be some way provided to keep these fellows in for life when they are once sent there, or those of us who are opposed to hanging will have to give our unwilling consent to the execution of these wilful and deliberate murderers.

Eliminating the death penalty...will not hinder the prosecutorial capacity to seek, or the court's ability to impose, 'life without parole' sentences for serious, heinous crimes and criminals.