Antonin Scalia Quotes

Capital punishment, that thing scares me, it really does. I was talking to my friend about the electric chair, and he starts freakin' out. He's like 'the electric chair? That's too good for these people. That's too good for them'. Alright, how do we make the electric chair worse? How about this? They have to pedal a car battery to their own head. Is that ok? Is that enough, Mr. Hitler?

You will be excellently executed.

Now in Utah if you get the death sentence, they have the firing squad. In Russia, they call that early retirement.

Execution halts your breath, helter skelter spiral death.

Henceforth, there shall be no more execution by beheading with an axe.

Assassination on the scaffold is the worst form of assassination.

How had I not seen that there was nothing more important than an execution, and that when you come right down to it, it was the only thing a man could truly be interested in?

The execution of William Bonin was not the traditional gas chamber of the past. That has been ruled cruel and unusual. Instead, we have something that seems very kind and benign and technical; the injection of chemicals, Nazi-style.

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

I am a proponent of capital punishment. I am not a proponent of capital torture.

When the lever is pulled, the body twists and shudders violently, cooks and sizzles obscenely, and emits horrible noises from the nose, mouth and anus…Chapman said it was the ghastliest mode of death he could have conjured, short of slow torture, and that no sane person who witnessed it could possibly oppose its replacement by a less violent means of execution.

If a man dies when you hang him, keep hanging him until he gets used to it.

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

I have the death sentence in seven genres.

We are concerned here only with the imposition of capital punishment for the crime of murder, and when a life has been taken deliberately by the offender, we cannot say that the punishment is invariably disproportionate to the crime. It is an extreme sanction suitable to the most extreme of crimes.

Remember the death penalty is murder.

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

A hanging in a good quarrel is an easy death they say, though I could never hear of any that came back to say so.

Now the Tombs, like the name says, are so horrible that they had to close it down. Today it doesn't exist and people go in the electric chair and all that.

Something about Texas I'm not proud of is that our state murdered 37 people last year alone.

'Tis ill talking of halters in the house of a man that was hanged.

Yesterday afternoon 247 Spanish and Canary Island prisoners were decapitated. Today all the Spaniards and Canary Islanders who were sick in the hospital were decapitated, constituting the last of all those included in the order of Your Excellency.

I don't oppose my own death by firing squad. But that might be letting me off too lightly. Chopping off my head might be better.

We should execute 27, or 30 or 35 people at one time.

One of the reasons that I chose firing squad as opposed to any other form of execution is because it’s one of the cheapest for the state.