Capital Punishment Debate Quotes

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.

Life is indeed precious, and I believe the death penalty helps affirm this fact.

We have a legal system, and we have a penal code. We have the death penalty in Saudi Arabia, and people should respect this.

Capital punishment? It makes no sense as a policy: It's not a deterrent, and economically it's a disaster. It's very clear that there are innocent people on death row. And if I put an innocent person to death, that's murder.

I regard the death penalty as a savage and immoral institution that undermines the moral and legal foundations of society.

Like cellulite creams or hair-loss tonics, capital punishment is one of those panaceas that isn't. Only it costs a whole lot more.

The death sentence is a barbaric act . . . It is a reflection of the animal instinct still in human beings.

The death penalty fulfills a preventive function, but it is also very clearly a form of revenge. It is an especially severe form of punishment because it is so final. The human life is ended and the executed person is deprived of the opportunity to change, to restore the harm done or compensate for it.

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.

We should find ourselves committed to killing a great many people whom we now leave living, and to leave living a great many people whom we at present kill. We should have to get rid of all ideas about capital punishment.

That's why I'm a big supporter of the death penalty. I want to be the hangman. I would put many more people to death like the kids who want to kill other people, I'd put 'em to death. Postal workers who get arrested, they have mental problems. You know what? When you're dead you don't have a mental problem. If you take a life, I will take yours. Put me in charge, I will fix it.

From this day forward, I no longer shall tinker with the machinery of death. ... I fell morally and intellectually obligated simply to concede that the death penalty experiment has failed.

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.

Many states and even many people who are in support of the death penalty question their support of the death penalty because of the imperfection of our courts. Through DNA testing, we don't always get it right, even with that.

I have also seen it stated that Capital punishment is murder in its worst form. I should like to know upon what principle of human society these assertions are based and justified.

I am against using death as a punishment. I am also against using it as a reward.

The (capital punishment) controversy passes the anarch by. For him, the linking of death and punishment is absurd. In this respect, he is closer to the wrongdoer than to the judge, for the high-ranking culprit who is condemned to death is not prepared to acknowledge his sentence as atonement; rather, he sees his guilt in his own inadequacy. Thus, he recognizes himself not as a moral but as a tragic person.

It's time the long arm of the law put a few more in the ground, send them all to their maker and he'll settle them down.

At some point in this death-penalty debate, the sanctity of innocent life demands that men and women of conservative conscience have to say: Enough.

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

All trials are trials for one's life, just as all sentences are sentences of death.

I believe that inside many Americans lies certain uneasiness about capital punishment.

Capital punishment, that thing scares me, it really does. I was talking to my friend about the electric chair, and he starts freakin' out. He's like 'the electric chair? That's too good for these people. That's too good for them'. Alright, how do we make the electric chair worse? How about this? They have to pedal a car battery to their own head. Is that ok? Is that enough, Mr. Hitler?

I think this country would be much better off if we did not have capital punishment.... We cannot ignore the fact that in recent years a disturbing number of inmates on death row have been exonerated.

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.