Execution Chamber Quotes

If a man dies when you hang him, keep hanging him until he gets used to it.

All that's missing for Utah is a blindfold and a cigarette.

You will be excellently executed.

Most of us continue to believe that those who show utter contempt for human life by committing remorseless, premeditated murder justly forfeit the right to their own life.

The people I have no feeling for are professional killers. But I count that man no worse than a governor who won't commute a death sentence because it's unpolitical.

So the thing that bothered me most was that the condemned man had to hope the machine would work the first time.

Condemned and executioner with aren't coupled in a primitive rite.

Most people are not affected by [the death penalty]. It's like how many people are actually sent to Iraq and Afghanistan? Such a small percentage.

I will always remember the fear in the faces of the executed. That's the first day I felt the devil's presence.

As the warden of San Quentin, I presided over four executions. After each one, someone on the staff would ask, 'Is the world safer because of what we did tonight?' We knew the answer: No.

What you do to these men on California's Death Row, you do to God.

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

It's like being on Death Row in an American jail. You are waiting for the door handle to turn, not knowing whether it's a reprieve or just your final breakfast before being executed.

I watched the needle take another man.

The great danger of humane punishment is that people will come to accept state murder as something sanitary. I don't think bureaucracy should ever be entrusted with that kind of power.

How had I not seen that there was nothing more important than an execution, and that when you come right down to it, it was the only thing a man could truly be interested in?

I am a child of America. If ever I'm sent to Death Row for my revolutionary 'crimes,' I'll order as my last meal: a hamburger, french fries, and a coke.

It was the most haunting room I've ever seen. Because you know what's in it? All the left­overs, all the paraphernalia that the different condemned men had had with them in the "holding" cells.

That execution will take place here." She runs her fingertips over the table beneath her. "On this table. I thought it would be interesting to show you." "I knew what would happen when I came here," I say. "It's just a table. And I'd like to go back to my room now.

Make your way to death row and speak with the tragic victims of criminality. As they prepare to make their pathetic walk to the electric chair, their hopeless cry is that society will not forgive. Capital punishment is society's final assertion that it will not forgive.

Execution halts your breath, helter skelter spiral death.

In Texas, we have the death penalty, and we use it. That's right. If you come to Texas and kill somebody, we will kill you back.

You have no idea what an appetite it gives one, being executed.

The death penalty only should be - if you agree with it, which I don't, only allowed for murder. You have to murder someone to get the death penalty.

We are concerned here only with the imposition of capital punishment for the crime of murder, and when a life has been taken deliberately by the offender, we cannot say that the punishment is invariably disproportionate to the crime. It is an extreme sanction suitable to the most extreme of crimes.