Sunny Hostin Quotes
We are talking about a pendulum of decency when it comes to societal standards…At one point the guillotine was fine. At one point the firing squad was fine. Our Supreme court is trying to make it more palatable by saying “death by lethal injection”
The 8th Amendment to the Constitution prohibits “cruel and inhuman punishment”. But society’s perception of what is cruel and what is unusual changes over time. And the Supreme Court has tried to keep up with those changing perceptions in determining what is a legal method of execution for those states that still allow capital punishment.
Sunny Hostin, Federal Prosecutor & Legal Expert, CNN News, January 17, 2014
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
In 1938 when Hitler started his military operatiomn to overrun Europe, he abolished beheading with the axe a traditional and barbarous form of capital punishment. The two legal methods of execution in Germany after this decree were hanging and a version of the guillotine.
Einstein had changed his mind. He like almost everyone else at the time favored the death penalty, but in 1927 came to the new conclusion for the same reasons that many American politicians stated 70 years later. He had no compunctions against capital punishment for murderers who were dangers to society, but the potential error of the justice system led him to oppose state sanctioned execution. At the time the number of errors in capital cases that had been demonstrated were few. But as a scientist, Einstein knew that all human endeavors were prone to error. He was a strong law and order supporter however—see {588606}.
Recalling what the Oklahoma state medical examiner told him about electrocutions.
This quotation is often incorrectly ascribed to Joseph Stalin whose approach to dissidents comported with Monteverde.
Ironically it takes skill to hang a person, or to operate an electric chair or gas chamber, and lethal injection takes several skilled trained people. While a firing squad can be organized with people who have no other skill than to shoot straight at a short distance of which there are tens of millions of Americans. However, for many people it was offensive in discussing the serious and fundamentally moral issue of capital punishment to be concerned with saving a few dollars relative to being humane and reflecting American values.
Joseph-Ignace Guillotin was not thye inventor or the execution machine that bears his name. The actual inventor of the prototype was Antoine Louis. However, Guillotin--a physician by training was very concerned that a very high percentage of beheadings were botched by the executioner and the victim suffered greatly. He became the public and political advocate for the reform of the mode of execution in France to reduce suffering. The device ended up with his name as the noun to describe it. In this quotation, he made his first majhor speech to his fellows of the French Chamber of Deputies in 1791. Prior to the Frech Revolution beheading was the method of execution reserved for the Nobility & Aristocracy. They couod pay the executioner a "fee" to be sure that his sword or ax was sharp and that he/she would not suffer much. Nonetheless, many executions were botched. After the Revolution giving ALL citizens the same royal execution if they were convicted felons. So its adoption was a revolutionay act and philosophically based.
Asunción Cummings Hostin, known professionally as Sunny Hostin, is an American lawyer, journalist, and television host. Hostin is co-host on ABC's morning talk show The View as well as the Senior Legal Correspondent and Analyst for ABC News. She is also the host and executive producer of Investigation Discovery's true crime series Truth About Murder with Sunny Hostin.
