Death Penalty Debate Quotes

The punishment of death is the war of a nation against a citizen whose destruction it judges to be necessary or useful.

No politician after the Nixon-Agnew years would say, 'I was against the death penalty,' because they replaced 'soft on communism' with 'soft on crime.' You just see the horror of this thing.

I don't think there's any question that someday somebody who is innocent will be executed in this country again.

If an offender has committed murder, he must die. In this case, no possible substitute can satisfy justice. For there is no parallel between death and even the most miserable life, so that there is no equality of crime and retribution unless the perpetrator is judicially put to death.

To vindicate the sanctity of human life by taking it is an outrage upon reason. The spectacle of a human being dangling at the end of a gallows-rope is a degradation of humanity.

There is a certain right by which we many deprive a man of life, but none by which we may deprive him of death; this is mere cruelty.

These death sentences are cruel and unusual in the same way that being struck by lightning is cruel and unusual.

When the state imposes the death penalty, it proclaims that taking one human life counterbalances the taking of another life. This assumption is profoundly mistaken.

The great danger of humane punishment is that people will come to accept state murder as something sanitary. I don't think bureaucracy should ever be entrusted with that kind of power.

Teresa Lewis, the only woman on death row in Virginia, says she doesn't deserve the death penalty because she only hired the killers of her husband and stepson, she didn't actually pull the trigger herself. You know, she has a point. I think we should let her be able to hire the person who executes her, and not do yourself in! How's that, doll? Yeah! Get it over with quick, maybe Charlize Theron will sign up to play you.

I remember on page one of The New York Times the article about Fred Leuchter. The heading was "Can Capital Punishment Be Humane" and it was the story about an electric chair repairman and execution machine designer. And then buried in the back of the paper was the fact that Fred Leuchter had also been involved in holocaust denial.

McVeigh's lawyer got him the death penalty, which, quite frankly, I could have done.

The main objection to killing people as a punishment...is that killing people is wrong

Anyone who believes in capital punishment should be shot

There is a legitimate argument over whether the death penalty effectively deters violent crime, although my personal observation is that not one of the criminals who have been executed over the years has ever killed again.

I had concluded when I was the prosecutor that I would vote against the death penalty if I were in the legislature but that I could ask for it when I was satisfied as to guilt.

I want to see if she is serious about the death penalty.