Capital Punishment Support Quotes

If the executioner goes, my package will never be made public. If he doesn't go, it will be made public exactly fifty years from the day the bill for a moratorium on capital punishment is defeated. ~ Caryl Chessman

The death penalty is a poor person's issue. Always remember that: after all the rhetoric that goes on in the legislative assemblies, in the end, when the deck is cast out, it is the poor who are selected to die in this country. ~ Helen Prejean

You can see the same immorality or amorality in the Christian view of guilt and punishment. There are only two texts, both of them extreme and mutually contradictory. The Old Testament injunction is the one to exact an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth (it occurs in a passage of perfectly demented detail about the exact rules governing mutual ox-goring; you should look it up in its context (Exodus 21). The second is from the Gospels and says that only those without sin should cast the first stone. The first is a moral basis for capital punishment and other barbarities; the second is so relativistic and "nonjudgmental" that it would not allow the prosecution of Charles Manson. Our few notions of justice have had to evolve despite these absurd codes of ultra vindictiveness and ultracompassion. ~ Christopher Hitchens

This country is becoming increasingly authoritarian. It's based on capital punishment. ~ Kate Millett

Whoever insults the message of Mohammed is going to be subject to capital punishment. ~ Anjem Choudary

I've no patience with modern humanitarian scruples about capital punishment. ~ Agatha Christie

Abstractions about capital punishment were one thing, but the details of systematically killing someone who is not a threat are completely different. ~ Bryan Stevenson

The purpose of punishment is to improve those who do the punishing
that is the final recourse of those who support punishment. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

I am often filled with wonder when I see some men demanding the time of others and those from whom they ask it most indulgent. Both of them fix their eyes on the object of the request for time, neither of them on the time itself; just as if what is asked were nothing, what is given, nothing. Men trifle with the most precious thing in the world; but they are blind to it because it is an incorporeal thing, because it does not come beneath the sight of the eyes, and for this reason it is counted a very cheap thing - nay, of almost no value at all. Men set very great store by pensions and doles, and for these they hire out their labour or service or effort. But no one sets a value on time; all use it lavishly as if it cost nothing. But see how these same people clasp the knees of physicians if they fall ill and the danger of death draws nearer, see how ready they are, if threatened with capital punishment, to spend all their possessions in order to live! So great is the inconsistency of their feelings. But if each one could have the number of his future years set before him as is possible in the case of the years that have passed, how alarmed those would be who saw only a few remaining, how sparing of them would they be! And yet it is easy to dispense an amount that is assured, no matter how small it may be; but that must be guarded more carefully which will fail you know not when. ~ Seneca

In countries with a properly functioning legal system, the mob continues to exist, but it is rarely called upon to mete out capital punishment. The right to take human life belongs to the state. Not so in societies where weak courts and poor law enforcement are combined with intractable structural injustices. ~ Teju Cole

As such, we must oppose torturing human beings for the same reason we oppose "choice" in abortion rights, because torture dehumanizes both the tortured and the torturer. We ought to be those insisting that capital punishment, where it exists, is not discriminatory against the poor or racial minorities and that it not exist as part of a system in which innocent persons are mistakenly executed. A death penalty that exempts the white and the affluent, while putting to death those without the power to evade such justice, is hardly what God set forth in the covenant with Noah or in the sword-wielding delegated authority to Caesar to punish evildoers. And, even short of the death penalty, we should care about impartiality before the law, in the making and in the enforcement of laws for all persons, regardless of race or ethnicity or background. ~ Russell D. Moore

Any assassination is an assassination. It's cold, it's terrible. I'm against any capital punishment. Only the Lord has the right to take away life because he's the giver of life. And assassination stands against democracy, against civilization, against a civilized life of people. Alas, the situation in Lebanon is very chaotic and many innocent people lost their lives because they have a state within a state, an army within an army and the respect for life is not high enough. ~ Shimon Peres

I think capital punishment works great. Every killer you kill never kills again. ~ Bill Maher

At the end of the day, perhaps the best argument against capital punishment may be that it is an issue beyond the limited capacity of government to get things right. ~ Scott Turow

The national laws of the five regions of India prescribe no cangue, beatings or prison. Those who are guilty are fined in accordance with the degree of the offence committed. There is no capital punishment. ~ Hyecho

And capital punishment, however ineffective it may be and through whatever ignorance it may be resorted to, is a strictly defensive act, - at least in theory. ~ Benjamin Tucker

We could say that people who eat grits, listen to country music, follow stock-car racing, support corporal punishment in the schools, hunt 'possum, go to Baptist churches and prefer bourbon to Scotch are likely to be Southerners. ~ John Shelton Reed

Anyone who believes in capital punishment should be shot ~ Banksy

Capital punishment is against the best judgment of modern criminology and, above all, against the highest expression of love in the nature of God. ~ Martin Luther King, Jr.

Capital punishment is our society's recognition of the sanctity of human life. ~ Orrin Hatch

I believe that inside many Americans lies certain uneasiness about capital punishment. ~ Bill O'Reilly

But these days, there's also a strong economic argument for doing away with capital punishment. With California facing its most severe fiscal crisis in recent memory ... it would be crazy not to consider the fact that it will add as much as $1 billion over the next five years simply to keep the death penalty on the books. ~ John Van De Kamp

I'm disappointed that my own Catholic Church has decided that capital punishment is wrong. Which is pretty hypocritical if you think about it, because they wouldn't even have a religion if it wasn't for capital punishment. ~ Stephen Colbert

Everybody believes that capital punishment is wrong, but when they look at certain cases, they're quick to say, 'Put them to death,' or scream 'capital punishment.' ~ Jeff Lindsay

Most people approve of capital punishment, but most people wouldn't do the hangman's job. ~ George Orwell

Plea Against the Death Penalty
Look, examine, reflect. You hold capital punishment up as an example. Why? Because of what it teaches. And just what is it that you wish to teach by means of this example? That thou shalt not kill. And how do you teach that "thou shalt not kill"? By killing.
I have examined the death penalty under each of its two aspects: as a direct action, and as an indirect one. What does it come down to? Nothing but something horrible and useless, nothing but a way of shedding blood that is called a crime when an individual commits it, but is (sadly) called "justice" when society brings it about. Make no mistake, you lawmakers and judges, in the eyes of God as in those of conscience, what is a crime when individuals do it is no less an offense when society commits the deed. ~ Victor Hugo

Capital punishment kills immediately, whereas lifetime imprisonment does so slowly. Which executioner is more humane? The one whokills you in a few minutes, or the one who wrests your life from you in the course of many years? ~ Anton Chekhov

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. ~ Cesare Beccaria

I expect you (William Whitelaw) were as impressed as I was to read of the recent electrocution in Florida of a character called John Spenkelink in the electric chair. It seems that a full six minutes passed before Spenkelink was dead, during which time he hopped about like a prawn on a hot plate. ~ William Donaldson

In effect, nobody who is not from the losing classes has ever been thrust into a death cell in these United States. ~ Christopher Hitchens

As a Catholic, you can have two views on capital punishment. You can think, let Caesar do what Caesar needs to do, and the law says you can impose capital punishment, so you impose it. You can [also] be a Catholic who says we can't kill, we can't kill babies and we can't kill adults. If you let a decision be driven by your personal views, then you are not doing what a judge needs to do, which is enforce the laws of the society that you are in. But you can control your own behavior, and that is the choice that the church and God gives us - what kind of people are we going to be. ~ Sonia Sotomayor

Ninety countries still hold on to capital punishment, and, sadly, one of these is the United States, the only Western industrialized country to practice this barbaric punishment. ~ Antoinette Bosco

Our laws as we support them now are slow, wasteful, cumbrous systems, which require a special caste to interpret and another to enforce; wherein the average citizen knows nothing of the law, and cares only to evade it when he can, obey it when he must. ~ Charlotte Perkins Gilman