Life Imprisonment Quotes

Let the punishments of criminals be useful. A hanged man is good for nothing; a man condemned to public works still serves the country, and is a living lesson.

Personally, I am opposed to capital punishment. . . . If there were some way devised to prevent . . . the extension of executive clemency to men who are sent up for life, if there were some way to keep them in for life, then I believe the public would be satisfied with the abolition of capital punishment. . . . In 1907 I was appointed to prosecute a man for one of the foulest cases of wife murder that I ever knew. . . . When the jury went out the first ballot was eleven for hanging and one for life imprisonment. . . . The second ballot was twelve for life imprisonment. . . . It is not seventeen years since I tried that case and yet this man is walking the streets to-day a free man by the action of some subsequent governor of Indiana, who pardoned or paroled over my protest. There will either have to be some way provided to keep these fellows in for life when they are once sent there, or those of us who are opposed to hanging will have to give our unwilling consent to the execution of these wilful and deliberate murderers.

The death penalty is abolished – even at the front!

I'm not in favor of the death penalty. But I'm in favor of locking these people away in maximum security units where they can never get out. They can never escape. They can never be paroled. Lock the bad ones away. But you gotta rethink everybody else.

I'd rather lock somebody up and throw away the key and put them in hard labor, the ultimate penalty that the law will allow, but I'm opposed to the death penalty

I believe that the death penalty is an effective penalty.

Other states are trying to abolish the death penalty... mine's putting in an express lane.

If I were asked to chose between execution and life in prison I would, of course, chose the latter. It's better to live somehow than not at all.

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.

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

How come life in prison doesn't mean life? Until it does, we're not ready to do away with the death penalty. Stop thinking in terms of "punishment" for a minute and think in terms of safeguarding innocent people from incorrigible murderers. Americans have a right to go about their lives without worrying about these people being back out on the street. So until we can make sure they're off the street permanently, we have to grit our teeth and put up with the death penalty

L. Ram Saran Das was sentenced to death in 1915, and the sentence was later commuted to life transportation. Today myself, sitting in the condemned cell, I can let the readers know as authoritatively that the life-imprisonment is comparatively a far harder lot than that of death.

I was badly mauled by people in New York State for being against the death penalty for 12 years.

The difference between more or less intelligent men is like the difference between criminals condemned to life imprisonment in smaller or larger cells. The intelligent man who is proud of his intelligence is like a condemned man who is proud of his large cell.

Where the death penalty is involved, our criminal justice system essentially reserves the death penalty for murderers (regardless of their race) who kill white victims.

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

One of my friends went on a murder weekend... now he is doing life for it.

I will make Mississippi the capital of capital punishment.

Personally I am very much against the death penalty for several reasons.

The death penalty scares the hell out of me. We now see about one out of eight errors in these convictions.

It has become increasingly difficult for states or the federal government to apply the death penalty. But why even try? Nothing is accomplished, and while the chances of making a mistake are now diminished - DNA can prove guilt as well as innocence - life in prison is a worthy substitute.

I shall ask for the abolition for the punishment of death until I have the infallibility of human judgment demonstrated to me.

Experience shows that the frequent use of severe punishment has never rendered a people better. The death of a criminal is a less effective means of restraining crimes than the permanent example of a man deprived of his liberty during the whole of his life to make amends for the injury he has done to the public.

I don't believe in a lot of things from the Bronze Age, but an eye for an eye does make a sort of symmetrical sense to me. I really believe that if somebody takes a life, that [death penalty] is what they should get. I also think it's a lot more humane than keeping people in a cage for the rest of their life.

Death is not only an unusually severe punishment, unusual in its pain, in its finality and in its enormity, but is serves no penal purpose more effectively than a less severe punishment.