Cruel and Unusual Quotes

I should not regret a fair and full trial of the entire abolition of capital punishment.

… the gallows, surrounded by a witless crowd with an insatiable blood lust …

Manditory minimums were almost always excessive, and they made me feel unethical, even dirty.

If you are sentenced to torture for a crime, yes, that is a cruel punishment. But the mere fact that somebody is tortured is - is unlawful under - under our statutes, but the Constitution happens not to address it, just as it does not address a lot of other horrible things.

We have laws against torture. The Constitution says nothing whatever about torture. It speaks of punishment; 'cruel and unusual' punishments are forbidden.

Capital punishment is vindictive – it is vengeful.

The pillory and stocks, the gibbet, and even the whipping-post, have seen many a noble victim, many a martyr. But I cannot think any save the most ignoble criminals ever sat in a ducking-stool.

When the lever is pulled, the body twists and shudders violently, cooks and sizzles obscenely, and emits horrible noises from the nose, mouth and anus…Chapman said it was the ghastliest mode of death he could have conjured, short of slow torture, and that no sane person who witnessed it could possibly oppose its replacement by a less violent means of execution.

For centuries the death penalty, often accompanied by barbarous refinements, has been trying to hold crime in check; yet crime persists.

It's a monstrous idea to put people in prison and keep them there.

It is a question whether, when we break a murderer on the wheel, we do not fall into the error a child makes when it hits the chair it has bumped into.

But this is not to say that the society which inflicts capital punishment commits murder.