Dinesh D'Souza Quotes

What makes someone too mentally ill to be executed? There is no clean answer to this question. But the attempt to answer it consumes substantial resources. If capital punishment had a demonstrable impact on crime, it might make sense to struggle with such a difficult balancing. But any deterrent effect is trivial at best, so the effort devoted to these decisions is wasted.

No punishment has ever possessed enough power of deterrence to prevent the commission of crimes.

There is no deterrent effect whatsoever by the presence of the death penalty.

I favor capital punishment. It saves lives.

We don't know if capital punishment is a deterrent, but we know that men we execute will not murder again.

The death penalty is discriminatory and does not do anything about crime.

Punishment can do a lot for criminals, and send a message to the rest of society.

I believe that people would be alive today if there were a death penalty.

As an American I wanted to explore... why are we the only first world country that still has capital punishment? Is it because we're too afraid to really examine the system, or is it because we really truly believe that this is the best way to deter future crime?

First of all, it does not deter crime, the death penalty.

Criminals are punished, that others may be deterred.

Capital punishment may not be much of a deterrent against murder, but the sight of a few corpses swinging from a scaffold might work with drug dealers.

Without the punishment of the Death by a Thousand Cuts, I am afraid people in China would have nothing to fear … and before long there would be more and more criminals, and it would be hard to ensure peace and stability.

Nothing will deter crime but the certainty of punishment.

I think it can be shown that the law makes ten criminals where it restrains one.

I have inquired for most of my adult life, about studies that might show that the death penalty is a deterrent, and I have not seen any research that would substantiate that point.

I regard the death penalty as a savage and immoral institution that undermines the moral and legal foundations of society. I reject the notion that the death penalty has any essential deterrent effect on potential offenders. I am convinced that the contrary is true - that savagery begets only savagery.

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

In a well governed state, there are few punishments, not because there are many pardons, but because criminals are rare; it is when a state is in decay that the multitude of crimes is a gaurantee of impunity.

The more killing and homicides you have, the more havoc it prevents.

You will be excellently executed.

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.

it is the certainty of being punished and not the horrifying spectacle of public punishment that must discourage crime

I believe in community policing. And, in fact, violent crime is one-half of what it was in 1991.

The death penalty experiment has failed.