Death Penalty Quotes - Page 13

• The mood and temper of the public in regard to the treatment of crime and criminals is one of the most unfailing tests of the civilisation of any country.

  Baron de Montesquieu

  Country, Tests, Criminals

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• Talk is cheap...It is the way we organize and use our lives everyday that tells what we believe in.

  Cesar Chavez

  Believe, Everyday, Use

  Cesar Chavez (2008). “An Organizer's Tale: Speeches”, p.353, Penguin

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• If the Old Testament were a reliable guide in the matter of capital punishment, half the people in the United States would have to be killed tomorrow.

  Steve Allen

  Punishment, People, United States

  Steve Allen (1994). “Reflections”

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• I find that students are very strong on my issues, stronger than anyone: anti-death penalty, anti-racial profiling, campaign finance reform, questioning the anti-terrorism bill.

  Russ Feingold

  Strong, Issues, Reform

  Interview with Matthew Rothschild, www.sharedhost.progressive.org. April 30, 2002.

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• My main area of activism is the death penalty, and it will continue to be once this crisis is over with.

  Steve Earle

  Penalties, Activism, Crisis

  "The Revolution Starts Now". Interview with Jeff Fleischer, www.motherjones.com. October 14, 2004.

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

  Ed Koch

  Believe, Facts, Helping

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• The government considers the aborting of innocent unborn children a natural right. Yet, there is widespread debate still about whether the death penalty for convicted murderers is "cruel and unusual punishment."

  Joseph Farah

  Children, Punishment, Government

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• There's a War Crimes Act in the United States passed by a Republican Congress in 1996, which says that grave breaches of the Geneva Convention are subject to the death penalty. And that doesn't mean the soldier that committed them - that means the commanders.

  Noam Chomsky

  War, Mean, Soldier

  Interview with M. Junaid Alam, www.counterpunch.org. December 27, 2004.

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• Sharia is the most oppressive system on earth. It encourages people to lie, if it's for the benefits of Islam. It doesn't allow Muslims to leave Islam, and there's a death penalty in all the schools of Sharia against those that leave Islam. Sharia defines what jihad is.

  Mark Durie

  Lying, School, People

  Source: www.sbs.com.au

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

  Adel al-Jubeir

  People, Arabia, Legal System

  Source: www.spiegel.de

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• I don't think Edward Snowden deserves a death penalty or life in prison. I think that's inappropriate. I think that's why he fled, [because] that is what he faced.

  Rand Paul

  Leadership, Party, Technology

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• A reform in the system of criminal jurisprudence, by which the death penalty shall no longer be inflicted . . . and by which our so-called prisons shall be virtually transformed into vast reformatory workshops, from which the unfortunate may emerge to be useful members of society, instead of the alienated citizens they now are.

  Victoria Woodhull

  Criminals, Reform, Citizens

  Victoria Claflin Woodhull (1871). “The Origin, Tendencies and Principles of Government: Or, A Review of the Rise and Fall of Nations from Early Historic Times to the Present: with Special Considerations Regarding the Future of the United States as the Representative Government of the World and the Form of Administration which Will Secure this Consummation. Also, Papers on Human Equality, as Represented by Labor and Its Representative, Money: and the Meaning and Significance of Life from a Scientific Standpoint, with Its Prophecies for the Great Future”

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• Of one thing, however, I am certain. Just as an execution without adequate safeguards is unacceptable, so too is an execution when the condemned prisoner can prove that he is innocent. The execution of a person who can show that he is innocent comes perilously close to simple murder.

  Harry A. Blackmun

  Simple, Adequate, Execution

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• The aura of the theocratic death penalty for adultery still clings to America, even outside New England, and multiple divorce, which looks to the European like serial polygamy, is the moral solution to the problem of the itch. Love comes into it too, of course, but in Europe we tend to see marital love as an eternity which encompasses hate and also indifference: when we promise to love we really mean that we promise to honor a contract. Americans, seeming to take marriage with not enough seriousness, are really taking love and sex with too much.

  Anthony Burgess

  Love, Marriage, Sex

  "You've Had Your Time, Being the Second Part of the Confessions of Anthony Burgess". Book by Anthony Burgess, 1990.

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• By reserving the penalty of death for black defendants, or for the poor, or for those convicted of killing white persons, we perpetrate the ugly legacy of slavery-teaching our children that some lives are inherently less precious than others.

  Joseph Lowery

  Children, Teaching, White

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• From this day forward, I no longer shall tinker with the machinery of death. For more than 20 years I have endeavored - indeed, I have struggled - along with a majority of this Court, to develop procedural and substantive rules that would lend more than the mere appearance of fairness to the death penalty endeavor. Rather than continue to coddle the Court's delusion that the desired level of fairness has been achieved and the need for regulation eviscerated, I feel morally and intellectually obligated to concede that the death penalty experiment has failed.

  Harry A. Blackmun

  Years, Majority, Needs

  "Bruce Edwin Callins v. James A. Collins 510 U.S. 1141". The U.S. Supreme Court case No. 93-7054, www.law.cornell.edu. February 22, 1994.

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• Despite the courts efforts to fashion a death penalty scheme that is just, fair and reliable, the system is not working. Innocent people are being sentenced to death......It is no answer to say that we are doing the best that we can. If this is the best our state can do, we have no business sending people to their deaths.

  Moses Harrison

  Fashion, People, Effort

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• Where would Christianity be if Jesus got eight to fifteen years with time off for good behavior?

  James B. Donovan

  Jesus, Eight, Years

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• One of the first laws against air pollution came in 1300 when King Edward I decreed the death penalty for burning of coal. At least one execution for that offense is recorded. But economics triumphed over health considerations, and air pollution became an appalling problem in England.

  Glenn T. Seaborg

  Kings, Air, Law

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• May the death penalty, an unworthy punishment still used in some countries, be abolished throughout the world.

  Pope John Paul II

  Country, Punishment, World

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• 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.

  Gene Simmons

  Kids, People, Ems

  Interview with Tim Cashmere, www.noise11.com. April 25, 2016.

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

  Charles Spurgeon

  Jesus, Wonder, Crosses

  Charles Spurgeon (2009). “Essential Works of Charles Spurgeon”, p.1465, Barbour Publishing

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• I think the death penalty's easier than life in prison.

  Pamela Smart

  Thinking, Prison, Easier

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• First of all, it does not deter crime, the death penalty.

  Patricia Cornwell

  Doe, Firsts, Crime

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• Within our own society, we jail more prisoners than any other country in the world, 85 percent of them people of nonwhite races — red, black, brown, and yellow. We are one of the few nations that still indulge in the death penalty for increasing numbers of these prisoners. We must become mindful of these negative things, since we need not support these actions of our nation to be affected negatively by their evolutionary impact, unless we mentally, verbally, and ultimately physically, disassociate ourselves from them.

  Robert Thurman

  Country, Impact, Race

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