Scott Turow Quotes

Our criminal justice system is fallible. We know it, even though we don't like to admit it. It is fallible despite the best efforts of most within it to do justice. And this fallibility is, at the end of the day, the most compelling, persuasive, and winning argument against a death penalty.

It is easy not to support the death penalty when there is doubt about the culpability of the person sitting in the chair; it is harder to sustain such principles when the crime of the accused is morally indefensible.

They all deserve to die. Even you, Mrs. Lovett Even I. Because the lives of the wicked should be made brief For the rest of us death would be relief.

The death penalty makes us all murderers.

Even if a civil society were to be dissolved by the consent of all its members (e.g., if a people inhabiting an island decided to separate and disperse throughout the world), the last murderer remaining in prison would first have to be executed, so that each has done to him what his deeds deserve and blood guilt does not cling to the people for not having insisted upon this punishment; for otherwise the people can be regarded as collaborators in his public violation of justice.

As it turned out, though, it was a lot easier to say that someone deserved to die for what they did than it was to take the responsibility to make that happen.

Hanging one scoundrel, it appears, does not deter the next. Well, what of it? The first one is at least disposed of.

I support the death penalty. But I also think there has to be no margin for error.

It is a question whether, when we break a murderer on the wheel, we do not fall into the error a child makes when it hits the chair it has bumped into.

'Til the infallibility of human judgements shall have been proved to me, I shall demand the abolition of the penalty of death.

It takes two to make a murder. There are born victims, born to have their throats cut, as the cut-throats are born to be hanged.

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

I do not think that condemning people who murder and killing them necessarily sends out the right message.

There is no right in acting.

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

When it's a moral grey zone, the audience has to think about what they feel and what they think is right or wrong. You want to affect your audience and make them think.

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

Shall any man be above Justice. Above all shall that man be above it, who can commit the most extensive injustice. When great crimes were committed I am for punishing the principal as well as the Coadjutors

The Court had better be right in its capital punishment cases and perhaps it not always is.

Are we deluding ourselves that by snuffing out the lives of our misfits, our nitwits and our psychopathic personalities, we are creating a better world for ourselves.

If I had had the slightest doubt, I certainly would not have imposed the death penalty.

All judges had rather that ten innocent should suffer than that one guilty should escape

The most disturbing thing, I think, with people that do very morally devious things more and more often is to see that they completely feel that they had no choice in the matter.

As one reads history ... one is absolutely sickened, not by the crimes that the wicked have committed, but by the punishments that the good have inflicted.

The death penalty is no more effective a deterrent than life imprisonment... It is also evident that the burden of capital punishment falls upon the poor, the ignorant and the underprivileged members of society.