Kinky Friedman Quotes

I'm excited we can be part of making the death penalty history.

The death penalty experiment has failed.

I should not regret a fair and full trial of the entire abolition of capital punishment.

If you hang them all, you will get the guilty. But that's not the American way of doing things.

Capital punishment is neither cruel nor unusual.

I don't believe in the death penalty. I believe that there are other people as we speak right now in prison, wrongfully accused, who could serve such a fate. That is injustice at its greatest.

I don't want a moratorium on the death penalty. I want the abolition of it. I can't understand why a country [USA] that's so committed to human rights doesn't find the death penalty an obscenity.

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

There are so many laws that no one is safe from hanging.

Those of us who spent time in the agricultural sector and in the heartland, we understand how unfair the death penalty is.

The death penalty serves no one. It doesn't serve the victims. It doesn't serve prevention. It's truly all about retribution....There comes a time when you have to ask if a penalty that is so permanent can be available in such an imperfect system. The only guarantee against executing the innocent is to do away with the death penalty.

When a man hangs from a tree it doesn't spell justice unless he helped write the law that hanged him.

The time will come when all people will view with horror light way in which society and its courts of law now take human life; and when that time comes, the way will be clear to device some better method of dealing with poverty and ignorance and their frequent byproducts, which we call crime.

I am passionately opposed to the death penalty for anyone . . . I think, myself, that it is an obscenity . . .

For justice to have any meaning, it must also mean that no innocent person should ever be executed.

I believe that inside many Americans lies certain uneasiness about capital punishment.

The death sentence is a barbaric act . . . It is a reflection of the animal instinct still in human beings.

I cannot see any of these death penalty cases where there hasn't been a violation on the ground of either poverty or race. If we can ever get that straightened out, it will help. But, of course, the real answer to it is to do away with the death penalty.

A life sentence without parole protects public safety while sparing us the barbarity of killing our own. It teaches our children that violence will be punished, but not by emulating the violent. This seems eminently more consistent with American ideals than continuing to share the killing stage with some of the world's worst human rights violators.

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.

There's a group in California that wants to make suicide a capital offense punishable by death. That's like punishing someone for being on a hunger strike by sending them to bed with no supper.

The abolition of the death penalty is making us a civilized society. It shows we actually do mean business when we say we have reverence for life.

I'm glad things are getting better, but I'm going to push and be pissed off until they're perfect. That will probably never happen, but I feel some weird duty nonetheless. Even though I can get married in Seattle, I could go to another country and get the death penalty just for being myself-I'm not making music just for fiancés in Seattle.

Ajamu Baraka is a human rights advocate and an international human rights advocate, who's been defending racial justice, economic justice, worker justice, indigenous justice, and justice for black and brown people all over the world, and in the United States has been helping to lead the charge against the death penalty here, and is an extremely eloquent and empowering person. And one of the great things about running with him is that we speak to all of America.

He was a first-time nonviolent possible offender, ... And under the mandatory minimums, he was put in prison for 15 years. Not only does the punishment not fit the crime, but the mandatory minimums don't give judges any discretion to look at the background of the case, to read into the specifics of the case. I don't know a judge who really is in favor of the mandatory minimums.