Death Row Inmate Quotes

This Court has never held that the Constitution forbids the execution of a convicted defendant who has had a full and fair trial but is later able to convince a habeas court that he is 'actually' innocent. ~ Antonin Scalia

A few years after you disappeared, a postal worker named Ben Carver was sentenced to death for murdering six young men. (He is a homosexual, which, according to Huckleberry, means he is not attracted to murdering young women.) Rumors have it that Carver cannibalized some of his victims, but there was never a trial, so the more salacious details were not made public. I found Carver's name in the sheriff's file ten months ago, the fifth anniversary of your disappearance. The letter was written on Georgia Department of Corrections stationery and signed by the warden. He was informing the sheriff that Ben Carver, a death row inmate, had mentioned to one of the prison guards that he might have some information pertaining to your disappearance. ~ Karin Slaughter

Advice? I don't have advice. Stop aspiring and start writing. If you're writing, you're a writer. Write like you're a goddamn death row inmate and the governor is out of the country and there's no chance for a pardon. Write like you're clinging to the edge of a cliff, white knuckles, on your last breath, and you've got just one last thing to say, like you're a bird flying over us and you can see everything, and please, for God's sake, tell us something that will save us from ourselves. Take a deep breath and tell us your deepest, darkest secret, so we can wipe our brow and know that we're not alone. Write like you have a message from the king. Or don't. Who knows, maybe you're one of the lucky ones who doesn't have to. ~ Alan W. Watts

One wrong move, one bad rumor, one mistake, and it's social death row. I'm the latest to be sentenced. Move out of the way, everyone. Dead girl walking.
-Riley ~ Dawn Klehr

People on death row, the treatment of animals, women's right to choose. So much in America is based on religious fundamentalist Christianity. Grow up! This is the modern world! ~ Eddie Vedder

We're trying to help people on death row. We're trying yo stop the death penalty, actually. We're trying to do something about prison conditions and excessive punishment. We want to free people who've been wrongly convicted. We want to end unfair sentences in criminal cases and stop racial bias in criminal justice. We're trying to help the poor and do something about indigent defense and the fact that people don't get the legal help they need. We're trying to help people who are mentally ill. We're trying to stop them from putting children in adult jails and prisons. We're trying to do something about the poverty and hopelessness that dominates poor communities. We want to see more diversity in decision-makingroles in the justice system. We're trying to educate people about racial history and the need for racial justice. We're trying to confront abuse of power by police and prosecutors. ~ Bryan Stevenson

Someone asked me if I would like to write a man on death row, be a pen pal, and I was like, sure. I volunteered. I had been in a place in my life - a relationship had ended; my parents were getting elderly - I was kind of adrift. The name that was given to me, just randomly, was Todd Willingham. And he wrote me a letter, and in this letter, he thanked me for writing him and [said that] if I would like to visit, he would put me on his visitor list ... I was just really struck by the letter from Todd. It was very polite; it was very kind. ~ Elizabeth Gilbert

Jealousy can instigate the cruellest act, or more to the point, hatred can. Miss Bennett was the one who found Nathan lying at the bottom of the stairs in the cellar, said he must have slipped or something, especially with one leg being so much weaker than the other. They as good people never would have suspected their own daughter of pushing him. That she never showed emotion over her brother's death was put down to trauma. I could see what they could not - a child incapable of any kind of feeling apart from selfishness. I can still picture him now, lying on his stomach, his head twisted at an unnatural angle, eyes glazed like one of Rhiannon's dolls. She was then about seven years old with the face of an angel and a nature as cruel as anyone on death row. ~ Tami Egonu

He was taking his time on his way to the arena, which meant there was likely something he was waiting for. He didn't intend to actually fight me, obviously, just as I didn't intend to fight him.
If all was going according to plan, and Yma had slipped the contents of the vial into the calming tonic he drank with his breakfast, the iceflowers were already swimming through his body. The timing would not be exact; that depended on the person. I would have to be ready for the potion to surprise me, or fail entirely.
"You're dawdling," I said, hoping that calling him out would speed him up. "What is it you're waiting for?"
"I am waiting for the right blade," Ryzek said, and he dropped down to the arena floor. Dust rose up in a cloud against his feet. He rolled up his left sleeve, baring his kill marks. He had run out of space on his arm, and started a second row next to the first, near his elbow. He claimed every kill that he ordered as his own, even if he himself had not brought about the death.
Ryzek drew his currentblade slowly, and as he raised his arm, the crowd around us exploded into cheers. Their roar clouded my thoughts. I couldn't breathe.
He didn't look pale and unfocused, like he had actually consumed the poison. He looked, if anything, more focused than ever.
I wanted to run at him with blade extended, like an arrow released from a bow, a transport vessel breaking through the atmosphere. But I didn't. And neither did he. We both stood in t ~ Veronica Roth

Nobody knew anyone else's private world. In the end, they were all alone as inmates on death row, side by side. Sometimes you could get a look at one another with a little pocket mirror, cell to cell, but that was all. ~ Janet Fitch

If death row is a sharp punishment, life without parole can be an endless torture. ~ Rene Denfeld

Everyone on Earth is on Death Row until they find a way out. It's not so hard to find the way out. The problem is wanting to. ~ Donna Goddard

People who are detained (held in prison) are locked up by their past, and because you are locked up by your past you are held hostage by your yesterdays. And if you are held hostage by your yesterdays, you cannot see your tomorrows. -- Rev. Earl Smith, author, Death Row Chaplain, creator of IMPACT (Incarcerated Men Putting Away Childish Things) ~ Rev. Earl Smith

I watch CNN every night, but never afterward think much about anything I see--even the election, as stupid as it is. I've come to loathe most sports, which I used to love--a loss I attribute to having seen the same thing over and over again too many times. Only death-row stories and sumo wrestling (narrated in Japanese) will keep me at the TV longer than ten minutes. My bedside table, as I've said, has novels and biographies I've read thirty pages into but can't tell you much about. ~ Richard Ford

To accept the environmentalist argument that the suffering of individual animals is inconsequential compared to the ozone layer, we must be willing to admit that the sufferings of minority groups, raped women, battered wives, abused children, people sitting on death row, and our loved ones are small potatoes beneath the hole in the sky. To worry about any of them is, in effect, to miniaturize the big picture to portraits of battered puppy dogs. ~ Karen Davis

Death row groupies mystify me. These women spend their lives visiting the condemned religiously, writing them daily, falling in love with them, and marrying them if they can. For some women, perhaps, condemned killers have that special aura or sex appeal. Apparently it gratifies their sense of romance or martyrdom. ~ Robert Blecker

The biggest government waste: The death penalty. An individual death-penalty case could climb to $100 million, much of it spent at the litigation level. Also, DNA evidence has exonerated nearly 300 death-row inmates. ~ John McLaughlin

I was in my late twenties and about to start my fourth year at the SPDC when I met Walter McMillian. His case was one of the flood of cases I'd found myself frantically working on after learning of a growing crisis in Alabama. The state had nearly a hundred people on death row as well as the fastest-growing condemned population in the country, but it also had no public defender system, which meant that large numbers of death row prisoners had no legal representation of any kind. ~ Bryan Stevenson

I've never been under the illusion that everybody on death row is innocent - far from it. My own guess is upwards of 90 percent are guilty. But a ten percent error rate if that's what it is, or even five percent, is really way too high. ~ Scott Turow

Every one thinks he's a good person, even those on Death Row. ~ Dale Carnegie

Why do they bother with a suicide watch when someone is on death row? "Keep an eye on this guy. We're gonna kill him, and we don't want him to hurt himself." ~ George Carlin

Soldiers in the heat of battle; death-row prisoners; explorers stranded in deserts, jungles, on mountaintops; anyone sick or lost or just tired and bewildered: we all wanted our mothers. ~ Marisa De Los Santos

Only those who will love longer than they expected to can truly love pecan pie, which doesn't explain its status as death rows most requested last dessert, or why chopped pecans, corn syrup, directions from the Karo bottle's cherry-red side are what mercy taste like to some. But there you have it. ~ Kate Lebo

The drink? Yes, I've had tough times in my life, especially the last year, regarding my ex-wife, my kids, I nearly broke my neck, I was on death row with pneumonia. ~ Paul Gascoigne

There was only one guy in the whole Bible Jesus ever personally promised a place with him in Paradise. Not Peter, not Paul, not any of those guys. He was a convicted thief, being executed. So don't knock the guys on death row. Maybe they know something you don't. ~ Neil Gaiman

He made a mistake, one that would send him to death row and eventually cost him his freedom for life. ~ John Grisham

Although I love all the great foods of the world, my death row meal would have to be cooked for me by my mother and grandmother (they live together and this happens on most Sundays). More than satisfy our hunger, these dinners nurture the soul. ~ Joe Bastianich

I've worked in the prison system, on death row and maximum security. I did that work for six years. I've worked with some of the most difficult people in our society. Buddhism was accessible and helpful for these individuals. ~ Joan Halifax

The light was crude. It made Artaud's eyes shrink into darkness, as they are deep-set. This brought into relief the intensity of his gestures. He looked tormented. His hair, rather long, fell at times over his forehead. He has the actor's nimbleness and quickness of gestures. His face is lean, as if ravaged by fevers. His eyes do not seem to see the people. They are the eyes of a visionary. His hands are long, long-fingered.
Beside him Allendy looks earthy, heavy, gray. He sits at the desk, massive, brooding. Artaud steps out on the platform, and begins to talk about " The Theatre and the Plague."
He asked me to sit in the front row. It seems to me that all he is asking for is intensity, a more heightened form of feeling and living. Is he trying to remind us that it was during the Plague that so many marvelous works of art and theater came to be, because, whipped by the fear of death, man seeks immortality, or to escape, or to surpass himself? But then, imperceptibly almost, he let go of the thread we were following and began to act out dying by plague. No one quite knew when it began. To illustrate his conference, he was acting out an agony. "La Peste" in French is so much more terrible than "The Plague" in English. But no word could describe what Artaud acted out on the platform of the Sorbonne. He forgot about his conference, the theatre, his ideas, Dr. Allendy sitting there, the public, the young students, his wife, professors, and directors.
His face was ~ Anais Nin

His own parents, the estimable Gilchrists, a couple who had taken the 'till death' part of their own wedding vows so seriously he wouldn't be surprised if they one day throttled one another, had naturally wangled the next best seat in the house: row two, on the aisle. ~ Ally Blake

Specialists debated whether to pull the plug, but Texas only executes people on death row, not when they're brain-dead, because it might mean culling most of their politicians. ~ Michael Robotham

We're all on death row, ultimately. Are you so stupid that don't see that? Sure, you kids in here, as enemies of the system, will assuredly die earlier than most. As well you should. But all of us everywhere have a one-way ticket to death. ~ James Patterson

I vote Democrat because I'm not concerned about millions of babies being aborted so long as we keep all death row inmates alive and comfy. ~ David Letterman

There's a great documentary on Tupac called 'Resurrection' about the last few years of Tupac's life and how he transformed. And, ironically, how this East Coast rapper became this West Coast icon, back when all that Death Row/Sean Combs stuff was going on. ~ Marco Rubio

His wings burned and he felt ashamed. This life in Italy had been a dark and ugly death for her. One of the worst. He would never stop blaming himself for the horrible way she had passed out of this life.
But that was years after where Daniel stood today. This was the hospital where they'd first met, when Lucia was so young and lovely, innocent and saucy in the same breath. Here she had loved him instantly and completely. Though she was too young for Daniel to show he loved her back,he had never discouraged her affection. She used to slip her hand inside his when they strolled under the orange trees on the Piazza della Repubblica,but when he squeezed her hand,she would blush.It always made him laugh,the way she could be so bold, then suddenly turn shy.She used to tell him that she wanted to marry him someday.
"You're back!"
Daniel spun around. He hadn't heard the door behind him opening. Lucia jumped when she saw him. She was beaming, showing a perfect row of tiny white teeth. Her beauty took his breath away.
What did she mean,he was back? Ah, this was when he'd hidden from Luce,frightened of killing her by accident. He was not allowed to reveal anything to her; she had to discover the details for herself. Was he even to hint broadly,she would simply combust. Had he stayed,she might have grilled him and perhaps forced the truth out of him...He didn't dare. ~ Lauren Kate

A relationship is not a death row
pardon. Being alone is not the end.
Your own head is a beautiful place
to visit. The architecture of your
thoughts deserves recognition for
its vast complexity and beauty. ~ Emm Roy