While I am a pro-life woman, I am also a woman who is concerned about rights for the disabled, maternity leave, the death penalty, health care, domestic violence, breastfeeding rights, etc.
Abby Johnson
Personally I am very much against the death penalty for several reasons.
Alan Parker
For centuries the death penalty, often accompanied by barbarous refinements, has been trying to hold crime in check; yet crime persists. Why? Because the instincts that are warring in man are not, as the law claims, constant forces in a state of equilibrium.
Albert Camus
If we are to abolish the death penalty, I should like to see the first step taken by my friends the murderers.
Alphonse Karr
My father was against the death penalty, and that was hard in the Son of Sam summer when fear was driving the desire for the death penalty.
Andrew Cuomo
I am against the death penalty.
The campaign against the death penalty has been - while a powerful campaign, its participants have been those who attend all of the vigils, a relatively small number of people.
Angela Davis
Had it not been for slavery, the death penalty would have likely been abolished in America. Slavery became a haven for the death penalty.
I hope that America will do away with the death penalty. I truly believe we are better than that.
Anthony Ray Hinton
I'm really trying to bring an end to the death penalty because it means so much to me.
If you think aficionados of a living Constitution want to bring you flexibility, think again. You think the death penalty is a good idea? Persuade your fellow citizens to adopt it. You want a right to abortion? Persuade your fellow citizens and enact it. That's flexibility.
Antonin Scalia
It's absolutely clear that whatever cruel and unusual punishments may - may mean with regard to future things, such as death by injection or the electric chair, it's clear that - that the death penalty, in and of itself, is not considered cruel and unusual punishment.
There exists in some parts of the world sanctimonious criticism of America's death penalty, as somehow unworthy of a civilized society.
But I'm not pro death penalty. I - I'm just anti the notion that it is not a matter for democratic choice, that it has been taken away from the democratic choice of the people by a provision of the Constitution.
Because values change, legislatures abolish the death penalty, permit same-sex marriage if they want, abolish laws against homosexual conduct. That's how the change in a society occurs. Society doesn't change through a Constitution.
I think in some instances that the death penalty is required.
Asa Hutchinson
I believe Timothy McVeigh getting the death penalty for his heinous act of killing over a hundred in Oklahoma City, that could very well deter others that might want to enter into that similar conduct.
While I oppose the death penalty as a policy matter, in a legal culture in which we reserve the right to execute people for relatively routine street crimes, it seems quite absurd for the justice system to get squeamish about executing the operational masterminds of Sept. 11.
Benjamin Wittes
The death penalty is being applied in the United States as a fatal lottery.
Bianca Jagger
I'm actually really opposed to the death penalty.
Bill Paxton
The death penalty confronts us with a penetrating moral question: Can even the monstrous crimes of those who are condemned to death and are truly guilty of such crimes erase their sacred dignity as human beings and their intrinsic right to life?
When the state imposes the death penalty, it proclaims that taking one human life counterbalances the taking of another life. This assumption is profoundly mistaken.
The death penalty is discriminatory and does not do anything about crime.
We have abolished the death penalty for humans, so why should it continue for animals?
The death penalty, I think, is a terrible scar on American justice, especially the concept of equal justice under law, but also of due process. And it goes state by state, and it's different in different states.
To exclude all jurors who would be in the slightest way affected by the prospect of the death penalty would be to deprive the defendant of the impartial jury to which he or she is entitled under the law.
The death penalty not only takes away the life of the person strapped to the table - it takes away a little bit of the humanity in each of us.
Those who support the death penalty are accepting a practice that is both ineffective and fundamentally flawed.
It is easy not to support the death penalty when there is doubt about the culpability of the person sitting in the chair; it is harder to sustain such principles when the crime of the accused is morally indefensible.
As one whose husband and mother-in-law have died the victims of murder and assassination, I stand firmly and unequivocally opposed to the death penalty for those convicted of capital offenses... An evil deed is not redeemed by an evil deed of retaliation.
The death penalty is becoming a way of life in this country.
Yes, I support the death penalty. It is an issue that cannot be fudged or hedged.
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.
I am not a proponent of the death penalty, but I will enforce the law as this Congress gives it to us.
No country can become an E.U. member state if it introduces the death penalty.
I'm pro-death penalty, but what I have not seen is anybody that would mock someone on death row.
Do I favor the death penalty? Theoretically, I do, but when you realize that there's a 4 percent error rate, you end up putting guilty people to death.
I don't want to put one innocent person to death to put 99 that are guilty to death. So philosophically I'm a tooth-for-tooth guy, but the reality is the death penalty as public policy is flawed.
Because the Illinois death penalty system is arbitrary and capricious - and therefore immoral - I no longer shall tinker with the machinery of death.
I support the death penalty. But I also think there has to be no margin for error.
If, through death penalty, we can create fears, though it's against my will, we have to do it.
I don't believe in the death penalty, but I understand personal vengeance.
I will admit, like Socrates and Aristotle and Plato and some other philosophers, that there are instances where the death penalty would seem appropriate.
I believe in the death penalty.
When I arrived in France aged 20, I marched against the death penalty, which was an unpopular thing to protest against at the time.
Under a death penalty statute that is going to stand up to constitutional muster, you look at the aggravating circumstances and the mitigating circumstances.
I had concluded when I was the prosecutor that I would vote against the death penalty if I were in the legislature but that I could ask for it when I was satisfied as to guilt.
I was personally opposed to the death penalty, and yet I think I have probably asked for the death penalty more than most people in the United States.
No true believer could be intolerant or a persecutor. If I were a magistrate and the law carried the death penalty against atheists, I would begin by sending to the stake whoever denounced another.
More prisons, more enforcement, effective death penalty.
