State Killing Quotes

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

Every time when there is an exoneration, and there have been hundreds of them, and somebody walks out of jail after years, people ask, “how could this happen?” …. State sanctioned killing is just wrong.

Allowing our government to kill citizens compromises the deepest moral values upon which this country was conceived: the inviolable dignity of human persons.

I will make Mississippi the capital of capital punishment.

The calculated killing of a human being by the state involves, by its very nature, an absolute denial of the executed person's humanity. The most vile murder does not, in my view, release the state from constitutional restraint on the destruction of human dignity.

Of all the remedies a civilized society uses to punish people for committing a crime, I don't think killing people is one of them.

The ability of so many people to live comfortably with the idea of capital punishment is perhaps a clue to how so many Europeans were able to live with the idea of the Holocaust: Once you accept the notion that the state has the right to kill someone and the right to define what is a capital crime, aren't you halfway there?

The death penalty is being applied in the United States as a fatal lottery.

I think a state should not be in the capacity of killing anyone with the exception of warfare.

I'm always theoretically opposed to capital punishment as a matter of policy; like, I don't believe a state should put its citizens to death.

As a mother trying to raise kids with some kind of a code, an honorable way to solve problems without using violence, I find it interesting to live in a country where your government is allowed to kill, whether it's war or execution. What interests me is not who deserves to die but who deserves to kill.

I don't want a moratorium on the death penalty. I want the abolition of it. I can't understand why a country [USA] that's so committed to human rights doesn't find the death penalty an obscenity.

No government in the world kills its people, unless it's led by a crazy person.

I know something about killing. I don't like killing. And I don't think a state honors life by turning around and sanctioning killing.

Did the Government kill people?

I remember having an argument with Alan, I said the Queen's not just going to call the guy up and send him out to do it. And Alan says, well, how would a monarch give orders to her assassin.

We should execute 27, or 30 or 35 people at one time.

The main objection to killing people as a punishment...is that killing people is wrong

There is no justification for execution by the state under modern circumstances … Bishops have testified against it, popes talk about it constantly and it has the same status as abortion in terms of rejection.

My objection to the death penalty is based on the idea that this is a democracy, and in a democracy the government is me, and if the government kills somebody then I'm killing somebody.