Life Sentence Quotes

Donald Beardslee is set for execution this week in California. His crimes were about twenty years ago, but it will be the first execution in California in quite some time.

My burden is my past as a TV star. But, you know, pasts cannot be a life sentence.

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

Childhood is the one prison from which there's no escape, the one sentence from which there's no appeal. We all serve our time.

I was in prison with the assassins of the former president of Egypt, Anwar Sadat, who was killed in 1981. Those who weren't executed in that case were given life sentences, and two of those were with me in prison.

You get to know everyone on death row. You become friends with them and their families. I met some great guys. Everyone regrets what they did.

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

In court, judges tell people that their conviction carries a sentence of years, or probation. The truth is far more terrible. People convicted of crimes often become social outcasts for life, finding it difficult or impossible to rent an apartment, get a job, adopt children, access public benefits, serve on juries, or vote.

Believe me, when you're sitting on death row, you want the appeal process to take time; as long as you're going through it, you're going to be alive.

Prosecutors frequently overcharge, load up charges on individual defendants, knowing that three strikes laws and harsh mandatory minimum sentences will force people to plea bargain and essentially convict themselves because they're terrified of doing a life sentence for a relatively minor crime.

When a juvenile offender commits a heinous crime, the State can exact forfeiture of some of the most basic liberties, but the State cannot extinguish his life and his potential to attain a mature understanding of his own humanity.

I know someone from growing up who is in jail right now for the rest of his life, but he was one of the sweetest people I ever knew.

The past is a life sentence, a blunt instrument aimed at tomorrow.

Take it from me, marriage isn't a word - it's a sentence.

When someone has spent a lifetime trying to survive a death sentence, the last thing you want is your children uncovering what you have been at such pains to conceal.

Politics is a life sentence. It's an obsessive, all-demanding, utterly fascinating, totally committing profession - stimulating, satisfying, stretching.

You can't reconcile being pro-life on abortion and pro-death on the death penalty.

I am convinced that the world-wide protests during the Rivonia trial saved Mandela and his fellow-accused from a death sentence. But in South Africa, a life sentence means imprisonment until death - or until the defeat of the government which holds these men prisoner.

Marriage is like pleading guilty to an indefinite sentence. Without parole.

I was first imprisoned in Pretoria, and then, thereafter, I was taken to Robben Island. I stayed there for a couple of weeks. I was taken back to Pretoria when I was charged in the Rivonia trial, when I was then sent to Robben Island for life.

If someone were to say that life at hard labor is as painful as death and therefore equally cruel, I should reply that, taking all the unhappy moments of perpetual slavery together, it is perhaps even more painful, but these moments are spread out over a lifetime, and capital punishment exercises all its power in an instant.

When you're going off to prison for the rest of your life, a lot of people do feel the need to explain themselves to all the people they have known.

We are all serving a life sentence in the dungeon of the self.

At the end of my trial, I was rather hoping the judge would send me to Australia for the rest of my life.

Any person who has carnal knowledge of any person against the order of nature … is liable to imprisonment for life.