quotations about capital punishment
I personally have always voted for the death penalty because I believe that people who go out prepared to take the lives of other people forfeit their own right to live. I believe that that death penalty should be used only very rarely, but I believe that no-one should go out certain that no matter how cruel, how vicious, how hideous their murder, they themselves will not suffer the death penalty.
MARGARET THATCHER
TV interview, A Plus 4, Oct. 15, 1984
When a juvenile commits a heinous crime, the State can exact forfeiture of some of the most basic liberties, but the State cannot extinguish his life and his potential to attain a mature understanding of his own humanity.
ANTHONY KENNEDY
judicial opinion, Roper v. Simmons, Mar. 1, 2005
Lynch the first, slaughter the last
Exterminate the absolute
Stain the just in the blood bath
Waste the pure, butcher the divine
Annihilate the sunrise
P.O.D. & SICK JACKEN
"Murdered Love"
I have become both intellectually engaged in the questions surrounding the death penalty and personally unsettled by the continued insistence in more than half the states in our nation that this is a reasonable punishment, even as nearly every other country we consider peers have eliminated it. And many of those countries whose values we consider inimical to ours--North Korea, Iran, Iraq--continue it.
NATHALIE BAPTISTE
"The Cruel Durability of Capital Punishment", Mother Jones, July 3, 2019
Death is a penalty
To one who would kill
My past is catching up with me
Got a coffin to fill
THE ELDERBERRIES
"Running for Life", Nothing Ventured Nothing Gained
It is better and more satisfactory to acquit a thousand guilty persons than to put a single innocent one to death.
MAIMONIDES
Sefer Hamitzvot
Here there's a back water remedy
Bitter intent to memory
A class E felony
Facing the death penalty
MOS DEF
"Hip Hop", Black on Both Sides