| "Capital punishment: them without the capital get the punishment." |
| - Last words of John Spenkelink, executed on May 25, 1979 in Starke Prison, Florida. |
| "People who are well represented at trial do not get the death penalty ... I have yet to see a death case among the dozens coming to the Supreme Court on eve-of-execution stay applications in which the defendant was well represented at trial." |
| - Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, U.S. Supreme Court |
| "He who is without sin among you, let him throw a stone at her first." |
| - Yeshua of Nazareth (Jesus Christ), interrupting the public execution of a woman for adultery. John 8:7 |
| "The death penalty is a poor person's issue. Always remember that: after all the rhetoric that goes on in the legislative assemblies, in the end, when the deck is cast out, it is the poor who are selected to die in this country." |
| - Sister Helen Prejean, C.S.J., author of "Dead Man Walking" |
| "Capital punishment is as fundamentally wrong as a cure for crime as charity is wrong as a cure for poverty." |
| - Henry Ford, industrialist, businessman |
| "Le pire dans le pire, c'est l'attente du pire." (The worst in the worst is expecting the worst. Our worst fears lie in anticipation.) |
| - Daniel Pennac, French novelist |
| "You can take away our names and replace them with numbers, cage and store us in conditions not even fit for your family dog, and exterminate us at your whim, but we are still human beings, capable of everything from love and beauty to violence and hate." |
| - Thomas B. Whitaker, Texas Death Row Inmate #999522 |
| "This is an execution, not surgery. Where does that come from, that you must find the method of execution that causes the least pain?" |
| - Antonin Scalia, U.S. Supreme Court Justice, on why Kentucky's lethal injection protocol did not qualify as cruel and unusual and therefore was not unconstitutional. |
| "I am constantly amazed by man's inhumanity to man." |
| - Primo Levi, Italian writer, philosopher, Nazi death camps survivor |
| "Capital punishment would be more effective as a preventive measure if it were administered prior to the crime." |
| - Woody Allen, actor, comedian, movie director, playwright |
| "Quand la vie ne tient qu'à un fil, c'est fou le prix du fil !" (When life is hanging by a thread, how expensive thread becomes!) |
| - Daniel Pennac, French novelist |
| "What will be left of the power of example if it is proved that capital punishment has another power, and a very real one, which degrades men to the point of shame, madness, and murder?" |
| - Albert Camus, French writer and philosopher, abolitionist |
| "When people of color are killed in the inner city, when homeless people are killed, when the "nobodies" are killed, district attorneys do not seek to avenge their deaths. Black, Hispanic, or poor families who have a loved one murdered not only don't expect the district attorney's office to pursue the death penalty --which, of course, is both costly and time consuming-- but are surprised when the case is prosecuted at all." |
| - Sister Helen Prejean, CSJ., author of "Dead Man Walking" |
| "Evidence of innocence is irrelevant!" |
| - Mary Sue Terry, former Attorney General of Virginia, replying to an appeal to introduce new evidence from a prisoner sentenced to death. |
| "My office closes at 5:00 pm." |
| - Sharon Keller, Presiding Judge of the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, refusing to keep the courtroom open past 5:00 pm to allow the late filing of a death sentence appeal by Michael Richard's attorneys and not informing the Judge assigned to deal with such an appeal. Michael Richard was put to death by lethal injection a few hours later at The Walls prison unit in Huntsville, Texas. |
| "Capital punishment is the most premeditated of murders." |
| - Albert Camus, French writer and philosopher. |
| "In the US the overwhelming majority of those executed are psychotic, alcoholic, drug addicted or mentally unstable. They frequently are raised in an impoverished and abusive environment. Seldom are people with money or prestige convicted of capital offenses, even more seldom are they executed." |
| - George Ryan, former Illinois Governor |
| "An execution is not simply death. It is just as different from the privation of life as a concentration camp is from prison. It adds to death a rule, a public premeditation known to the future victim, an organization which is itself a source of moral sufferings more terrible than death. Capital punishment is the most premeditated of murders, to which no criminal's deed, however calculated can be compared. For there to be an equivalency, the death penalty would have to punish a criminal who had warned his victim of the date at which he would inflict a horrible death on him and who, from that moment onward, had confined him at his mercy for months. Such a monster is not encountered in private life." |
| - Albert Camus, French writer and philosopher |
| "To assert in any case that a man must be absolutely cut off from society because he is absolutely evil amounts to saying that society is absolutely good, and no-one in his right mind will believe this today." |
| - Albert Camus, French writer and philosopher |
| "Retaliation is related to nature and instinct, not to law. Law, by definition, cannot obey the same rules as nature." |
| - Albert Camus, French writer and philosopher |
| "Our ancestors... purged their guilt by banishment, not death. And by so doing, they stopped that endless vicious cycle of murder and revenge." |
| - Euripides, Greek tragedian (ca. 480 BCE–406 BCE) |
| "The gallows is not only a machine of death but a symbol. It is the symbol of terror, cruelty, and irreverence for life; the common denominator of primitive savagery, medieval fanaticism and modern totalitarianism. It stands for everything that mankind must reject, if mankind is to survive the present crisis." |
| - Arthur Koestler, English novelist and essayist |
| "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." |
| - Charles-Louis de Montesquieu, French political thinker and philosopher (1689-1755) |
| "There is no crueler tyranny than that which is perpetrated under the shield of law and in the name of justice." |
| - Charles-Louis de Montesquieu, French political thinker and philosopher (1689-1755) |
| "And so to the end of history, murder shall breed murder, always in the name of right and honour, and peace, until the Gods are tired of blood and create a race that can understand." |
| - George Bernard Shaw, English playwright |
| "One is absolutely sickened, not by the crimes that the wicked have committed, but by the punishments that the good have inflicted; and a community is infinitely more brutalized by the habitual employment of punishment than it is by the occasional occurrence of crime." |
| - Oscar Wilde, Irish playwright and poet |
| "I don't think there's any words in the English language to explain what it's --what it's like to-- to sit on Texas death row and your thoughts are laying on that gurney, convicted but innocent and being put to death." |
| - Kerry Max Cook, twice convicted and sentenced to death for the 1977 rape murder of a 21-year-old secretary in Tyler, TX. Cook was released after 22 years. |
| "There's no other word than to say that it's hell. That sums it up." |
| - Alan Gell, who spent 9 years in prison, half of them on death row, for a murder he did not commit. |
| "It's not about whether you are innocent or guilty. It's about whether or not you can prove you're innocent. If you can't prove you're innocent, then you're considered guilty. It's been flipped: Now it's guilty until proven innocent." |
| - Ronald Jones, convicted of the 1989 rape murder of a Chicago woman before DNA tests cleared him. |
| "Watching preparations for an execution must be almost as tough on those waiting in line as it is on the man being executed. That is all it is, one long line, in which each man has to wait his turn - watching others ahead of him go one at a time." |
| - Donald A. Cabana, former warden of Mississippi's State Penitentiary (Parchman) who supervised two executions in the prison gas chamber before quitting his job and publicly opposing capital punishment. |
| "It’s strange when they near your cell. You lose all your strength and you are like this. You lose all your strength as if a rope is dragging it out of you. Then the footsteps stop in front of another solitary confinement cell and when you hear the sound of the key turning you feel relieved." |
| - Sakae Menda, who spent 34 years on Japan's death row before he was found innocent and exonerated. |
| "From the moment you are in that cell, when they tell you you’re going to be electrocuted, you contemplate it all the time. It never leaves your mind, and they never let it leave your mind." |
| - Jay C. Smith, who received 3 death sentences for a triple murder he did not commit, acquitted after spending 6 years on Pennsylvania's death row. |
| "The conditions of confinement are so oppressive, the helplessness endured in the roller coaster of hope and despair so wrenching and exhausting, that ultimately the inmate can no longer bear it, and then it is only in dropping his appeals that he has any sense of control over his fate." |
| - Dr. Stuart Grassian, psychiatrist and expert in death row inmates; about prisoners who "volunteer" for execution. |
| "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." |
| - Andrei Sakharov, Russian nuclear physicist, Nobel Peace Prize laureate |
| "The death sentence is a barbaric act." |
| - Nelson Mandela, former President of South Africa, Nobel Peace Prize laureate |
| "We do not wish to have the suffering of the servants of God avenged by the infliction of precisely similar injuries in the way of retaliation ... Not, of course, that we object to the removal from these wicked men of the liberty to perpetrate further crimes, but our desire is rather justice be satisfied without taking of their lives or the maiming of their bodies in any particular; and that, by such coercive measures as may be in accordance with the laws, they be drawn from their insane frenzy to the quietness of men in their sound judgement, or compelled to give up mischievous violence and betake themselves to some useful labour." |
| - St. Augustine, Christian philosopher and theologist (354-430) |
| "The ultimate weakness of violence is that it is a descending spiral, begetting the very thing it seeks to destroy. ... In fact, violence merely increases hate. ... Returning violence for violence multiplies violence, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars." |
| - Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., African-American political thinker, politician, activist |
| "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." |
| - Desmond Tutu, South African Anglican Archbishop of Cape Town, Nobel Peace Prize laureate |
| "With respect to the death penalty, I believe that a majority of the Supreme Court will one day accept that when the state punishes with death, it denies the humanity and dignity of the victim and transgresses the prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment. That day will be a great day for our country, for it will be a great day for our Constitution." |
| - William Brennan, former U.S. Supreme Court Justice |
| "At bottom, the battle has been waged on moral grounds. The country has debated whether a society for which the dignity of the individual is the supreme value can, without a fundamental inconsistency, follow the practice of deliberately putting one of its members to death." |
| - William Brennan, former U.S. Supreme Court Justice |
| "It is tempting to pretend that minorities on death row share a fate in no way connected to our own, that our treatment of them sounds no echoes beyond the chambers in which they die. Such an illusion is ultimately corrosive, for the reverberations of injustice are not so easily confined." |
| - William Brennan, former U.S. Supreme Court Justice |
| "Everyone is calm and collected but I am telling you something -- I am not calm and I am not collected. It's a sick world out there." |
| - Clive Stafford Smith, British lawyer who has worked for 26 years in the US, mainly defending people sentenced to death; after witnessing the execution of his client Edward Earl Johnson in 1987 in Mississippi. |
| "The time will come when all people will view with horror light way in which society and its courts of law now take human life; and when that time comes, the way will be clear to device some better method of dealing with poverty and ignorance and their frequent byproducts, which we call crime." |
| - Clarence Darrow, American lawyer and leading member of the American Civil Liberties Union |
| "Our emotions may cry for vengeance in the wake of a horrible crime, but we know that killing the criminal will not undo the crime, will not prevent similar crimes by others, does not benefit the victim, destroys human life and brutalizes society. If we are to still violence, we must cherish life. Executions cheapen life." |
| - Ramsey Clark, former United States Attorney General |
| "Our history shows that the death penalty has been unjustly imposed, innocents have been killed by the state, effective rehabilitation has been impaired, judicial administration has suffered. It is the poor, the sick, the ignorant, the powerless, and the hated who are executed." |
| - Ramsey Clark, former United States Attorney General |
| "Capital punishment in the United States is a direct descendant of lynching and other forms of racial violence." |
| - Thomas H. Speedy Rice |
| "There is a part of the warden that dies with his prisoner. Nobody else can suffer the intimacy of impending death, or experience the pitiable helplessness involved, in the same way as the warden and his condemned prisoner. Both are victims, unwilling captives of a human tragedy that is presented on a stage shrouded by mystery. It is played before a small, invited audience that is hidden from public view. Acted out in the darkness of night, as if to shield the citizenry from the awful reality of it all, an execution is a drama that panders to public fear and to a lust for vengeance, which is otherwise disguised as justice." |
| - Donald A. Cabana, former warden of Mississippi's State Penitentiary (Parchman) who supervised two executions in the prison gas chamber before quitting his job and publicly opposing capital punishment. |
| "But the chief and worst pain may not be in the bodily suffering but in one's not knowing for certain that in an hour, and then now, at the very moment, the soul will leave the body and that one will cease to be a man and that that's bound to happen; the worst part of it is that it's certain ... To kill for murder is a punishment incomparably worse than the crime itself. Murder by legal sentence is immeasurably more terrible than murder by brigands. Anyone murdered by brigands, whose throat is cut at night in a wood or something of that sort, must surely hope to escape till the very last minute ..., but in the other case (execution) all that last hope which makes dying ten times as easy is taken away for certain. There is the sentence, and the whole awful torture lies in the fact that there is certainly no escape, and there is no torture in the world more terrible." |
| - Feodor Dostoevsky, Russian novelist |
| "Crime is redeemed by remorse, but not by a blow of the axe or slipknot. Blood has to be washed by tears but not by blood." |
| - Victor Hugo, French novelist, playwright and poet |
| "An eye for an eye will make the whole world blind." |
| - Mahatma Gandhi |
| "Crime is, and should be, of grave concern to every right-thinking American. We are a people, however, in search of the quick fix, the simple solution, to a very complex problem. Only when we become serious about fighting poverty, child abuse, drugs, and a host of other scourges will we begin to make serious inroads on violent crimes. I was seldom surprised that the hundreds of condemned prisoners I worked with were on death row. But, when I had learned of their backgrounds and the sordid details of their so-called formative years, I was very often surprised that it had taken them as long as it had to get them there. In many respects, they were not different from most "normal", law-abiding people, except for a bad break here or a different chance there." |
| - Donald A. Cabana, former warden of Mississippi's State Penitentiary (Parchman) who supervised two executions in the prison gas chamber before quitting his job and publicly opposing capital punishment. |
| "I tell myself that I had simply better accept the fact that the death penalty is here to stay in our society, at least for a while, and there is nothing I can do about it. Maybe, in time- after how many executions? - people will come to realize the futility of randomly selecting a few people to die each year." |
| - Sister Helen Prejean, CSJ., author of "Dead Man Walking" |
| The profound moral question is not, "Do they deserve to die?", but "Do we deserve to kill them?" |
| - Sister Helen Prejean, CSJ., author of "Dead Man Walking" |
| “The act I committed to put me here was not just heinous, it was senseless. But the person that committed that act is no longer here - I am. I’m not going to struggle physically against any restraints. I’m not going to shout, use profanity or make idle threats. Understand though that I’m not only upset, but I’m saddened by what is happening here tonight. I’m not only saddened, but disappointed that a system that is supposed to protect and uphold what is just and right can be so much like me when I made the same shameful mistake…Tonight we tell the world that there are no second chances in the eyes of justice...Tonight, we tell our children that in some instances, in some cases, killing is right.” |
| - Napoleon Beazley, executed in Texas on the evening of 28 May 2002, despite a former Texas death row warden, 18 state legislators, the prosecutor from Beazley's home county, and even the judge who oversaw his trial and set his execution date, being among the thousands of people who had appealed for clemency. |
| "Oh ! nous sommes le dix-neuvième siècle ; nous sommes le peuple nouveau ; nous sommes le peuple pensif, sérieux, libre, intelligent, travailleur, souverain ; nous sommes le meilleur âge de l'humanité, l'époque de progrès, d'art, de science, d'amour, d'espérance, de fraternité ; échafauds ! qu'est-ce que vous nous voulez ? Ô machines monstrueuses de la mort, hideuses charpentes du néant, apparitions du passé, [...] Vous êtes les choses de la nuit, rentrez dans la nuit. Est-ce que les ténèbres offrent leurs services à la lumière ? Allez-vous-en. Pour civiliser l'homme, pour corriger le coupable, pour illuminer la conscience, pour faire germer le repentir dans les insomnies du crime, nous avons mieux que vous, nous avons la pensée, l'enseignement, l'éducation patiente, l'exemple religieux, la clarté en haut, l'épreuve en bas, l'austérité, le travail, la clémence. Quoi ? du milieu de tout ce qui est grand, de tout ce qui est vrai, de tout ce qui est beau, de tout ce qui est auguste, on verra obstinément surgir la peine de mort ?" |
| - Victor Hugo, French novelist, poet, playwright, politician, Aux habitants de Guernesey (1854) |
| "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. Now, that's just a personal belief that I have." |
| - John Kerry, Wolf Blitzer Reports, CNN, Sep. 17, 1996. |
| "To take a life when a life has been lost is revenge, not justice." |
| - Desmond Tutu, South African Anglican Archbishop of Cape Town, Nobel Peace Prize laureate |
| "The reality is that capital punishment in America is a lottery. It is a punishment that is shaped by the constraints of poverty, race, geography and local politics." |
| - Bryan Stevenson, Death Row lawyer |
| "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, writer, comedian, actor, movie director |
| "That led me to say that when push comes to shove, I'm against capital punishment." |
| - Scott Turow, American novelist and lawyer |
| "It don't work! It don't work!" |
| - Joseph L. Clark, Ohio, May 2, 2006. It took 22 minutes before the execution technicians found a vein suitable for insertion of the catheter. But three or four minutes thereafter, as the vein collapsed and Clark’s arm began to swell, he raised his head off the gurney and said five times, “It don’t work. It don’t work.” The curtains surrounding the gurney were then closed while the technicians worked for 30 minutes to find another vein. Media witnesses later reported that they heard “moaning, crying out and guttural noises.” Finally, death was pronounced almost 90 minutes after the execution began. |
| "I'd do exhaustive research, write a powerful legal argument, and then watch no one pay it any heed. The problem with this lawyerly approach is that nobody cares about rules or principles when they're dealing with a murderer. The lawyer says that the Constitution was violated every which way, and the judge says, Yeah, but your client killed somebody, right? For all our so-called progress, the tribal vengefulness that we think of as limited to backward African countries is still how our legal system works. Deuteronomy trumps the Sixth Amendment every time. Prosecutors and judges kowtow to family members of murder victims who demand an eye for an eye, and the lonely lawyer declaiming about proper procedures is a shouting lunatic in the asylum whom people look at curiously and then walk on by." |
| - David Dow, Defense lawyer and author of "Biography of an Execution" |
| "For where did Dante take the material of his hell but from our actual world? And yet he made a very proper hell of it." |
| - Arthur Schopenhauer, German philosopher (1788-1860) |
| "Obviously, this man was suffering. This was a violent death ... an ugly event. We put animals to death more humanely." |
| - Cameron Harper, television journalist who witnessed the 1992 execution of Donald Eugene Harding in Arizona's gas chamber. |
| "I regret very very much what happened." |
| - Morris Thigpen, Alabama Prison Commissioner, after it took two jolts of electricity, nine minutes apart, to complete the 1989 execution of Horace Franklin Dunkins, Jr. Because the cables had been connected improperly, it was impossible to dispense sufficient current to cause death. The cables were reconnected before a second jolt was administered. Death was pronounced 19 minutes after the first electric charge. |
| "The only thing that one in my position looks for is those simple words, "You have been granted a stay of execution." Without them I am just a corpse that hasn't the sense to lie down and pull the soil over its head." |
| - Kevin Varga, Texas Death Row inmate #999368, Day 74 of his Death Watch Journal, with 17 days to live (April 25, 2010). Kevin Varga was executed by the state of Texas on May 12, 2010. |
| "It is said to be a deterrent. I cannot agree....I do not now believe that any one of the hundreds of executions I carried out has in any way acted as a deterrent against future murder. Capital punishment, in my view, achieved nothing except revenge." |
| - Albert Pierrepoint, Britain's last official hangman, in his 1974 autobiography. |
| "They sensed that what had happened around them and in their presence, and in them, was irrevocable. Never again could it be cleansed; it would prove that man, the human species — we, in short — had the potential to construct an enormity of pain, and that pain is the only force created from nothing, without cost and without effort. It is enough not to see, not to listen, not to act." |
| - Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved (1986) |
| “In the history of the world it might even be that there was more punishment than crime.” |
| - Cormac McCarthy, The Road |
| "Robert Waterhouse was scheduled for execution at 6:00pm this evening. In accordance with the established execution protocol he was strapped to the gurney and the needles were inserted into each arm about 45 minutes prior to his appointed time. Just before 6:00, however, he received a 45-minute stay which morphed into an almost 3-hour endurance test as he remained on the gurney as the seconds, minutes and then hours slid by at an excruciatingly slow pace, waiting for someone to tell him if hope was at hand, if he would live or die. Just before 9:00 he received his answer, the plungers were depressed, the syringes emptied and he was summarily killed. Here on the row we can discern the approximate time of death when we see the old white Cadillac hearse trundle in through the back sally port gate to pick up the body, the same familiar 1960′s era hearse I’ve watched for almost 40 years, coming in to retrieve the bodies of murdered prisoners, which used to happen on a regular basis back when I was in open population. I’ve seen a lot of guys, both friends and foes, carted off in that old hearse. Anyway, pause for a moment to imagine being on that gurney for over three hours, the needles in your arms. You’ve already come to terms with your imminent death, you are reconciled with the reality that this is it, this is how you will die, that there will be no reprieve. Then, at the last moment, a cruel trick, you’re given that slim hope, which you instinctively grasp. Some court, somewhere, has given you a temporary stay. You stare at the ceiling while the clock on the wall ticks away. You are totally alone, not a friendly soul in sight, surrounded by grim-faced men who are determined to kill you. Your heart pounds, your body feels electrified and every second seems like an eternity as a Kaleidoscope of wild thoughts crash around franticly in your compressed mind. After 3 hours you are drained, exhausted, terrorized, and then the phone on the wall rings and you’re told it’s time to die…" |
| - William Van Poyck spent nearly 26 years on Florida's death row in solitary confinement. He wrote to his sister about his life in prison, and in recent years she published his letters to a blog called Death Row Diary. While on death row, Van Poyck authored three books, one of which won first-place honors in the memoir category in Writer's Digest 2004 Self-Published Book Awards. William Van Poyck was executed by the state of Florida on June 12, 2013 |
| “Suffering is one very long moment. We cannot divide it by seasons. We can only record its moods, and chronicle their return. With us time itself does not progress. It revolves. It seems to circle round one centre of pain.” |
| - Oscar Wilde, De Profundis |
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