Quotes on Death Penalty

For even the very wise cannot see all ends.

Many that live deserve death. And some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them? Then do not be too eager to deal out death in judgement. For even the very wise cannot see all ends.

Our criminal justice system is fallible. We know it, even though we don't like to admit it. It is fallible despite the best efforts of most within it to do justice. And this fallibility is, at the end of the day, the most compelling, persuasive, and winning argument against a death penalty.

Capital punishment is as fundamentally wrong as a cure for crime as charity is wrong as a cure for poverty.

More than two hundred death penalties are gone from the law books, but the [biblical] texts that authorised them remain.

Capital punishment is against the best judgment of modern criminology and, above all, against the highest expression of love in the nature of God.

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.

Jesus has borne the death penalty on our behalf. Behold the wonder! There He hang upon the cross!

Because the Illinois death penalty system is arbitrary and capricious - and therefore immoral - I no longer shall tinker with the machinery of death.

One area of law more than any other besmirches the constitutional vision of human dignity. . . . The barbaric death penalty violates our Constitution. Even the most vile murderer does not release the state from its obligation to respect dignity, for the state does not honor the victim by< emulating his murderer. Capital punishment's fatal flaw is that it treats people as objects to be toyed with and discarded. . . . One day the Court will outlaw the death penalty. Permanently.

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

We oppose the death penalty not just for what it does to those guilty of heinous crimes, but for what it does to all of us: It offers the tragic illusiion that we can defend life by taking life.

For whence did Dante take the materials for his hell but from this our actual world? And yet he made a very proper hell of it.

The death sentence is a barbaric act.

I regard the death penalty as a savage and immoral institution that undermines the moral and legal foundations of society. I reject the notion that the death penalty has any essential deterrent effect on potential offenders. I am convinced that the contrary is true - that savagery begets only savagery.

People who are well represented at trial do not get the death penalty.

Standing alone among great democratic nations in imposing the death penalty is another moral decision that Americansare being forced to confront.

In all religions, we make a choice about what we emphasize, and I choose to come down on the side of a loving God.

The punishment of murder by death is contrary to reason, and to the order and happiness of society, and contrary to divine revelation.

I have yet to see a death case among the dozen coming to the Supreme Court on eve-of-execution stay applications in which the defendant was well represented at trial... People who are well represented at trial do not get the death penalty.

Capital punishment is the most premeditated of murders.