Death Penalty Quotes

	«Our justice system is not simply an instrument of vengeance, despite the connotation to that effect contained in the extreme rhetoric that sometimes surrounds the constitutional debate over continuing use of the electric chair.»
	-- Harry Lee Anstead, Florida Supreme Court Justice, dissenting from a ruling that upheld the constitutionality of the electric chair, St. Petersburg Times, 9/26/1999.
	«As a staunch Christian, my religion abhors the taking of human life and so I think that capital punishment is not the ideal solution.»
	-- Justice Samuel Kwadwo Asiamah, nominee to the Supreme Court of Ghana, Crusading Guide, 3/2/2006.
	«Everyone in Texas hopes and prays that that's the case. I do not share his view.»
	-- Charles Baird, judge on the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, asked about whether he agreed with Governor George W. Bush that no one had been wrongfully executed under his watch.
	«Death penalty does not serve any social purpose or advance any Constitutional value and is totally arbitrary and unreasonable so as to be violative of Articles 14, 19, 21 of the (Indian) Constitution. ... Whether the State can take the life of an individual under the cover of judicial process, and whether such an act of killing by the State is in accord with the Constitutional norms and values and if, on an issue like this, the Judge feels strongly that it is not competent to the State to extinguish the flame of life in an individual by employing the instrumentality of the judicial process, it is his bounden duty, in all conscience, to express his dissent, even if such a killing by the State is legitimised by a previous decision of the Court. ...Judicial conclusions emanate from the judicial philosophy of those who sit in judgement and not from the language of the Constitution. Death penalty is irrevocable; it cannot be recalled. It is destructive of the right to life. Howsoever careful may be the procedural safeguards erected by the law before the penalty is imposed. it is impossible to eliminate the chance of judicial error. One innocent man being hanged should be enough to wipe out the value of capital punishment for ever.»
	-- P. N. Bhagwati, former Chief Justice of India.
	«Most nations that share our political and cultural traditions have done away with the death penalty. The nations that still have capital punishment include China, North Korea, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Syria and, before the American invasion, Iraq. I am not aware of any nation of our tradition that did away with capital punishment that has a worse crime problem than we have. Death-sentence cases seem interminable, with continuing appeals in state and federal courts. Yet there is a feeling that every defendant has the right to plead for his or her life as long as any court is available to review the case. Nothing would be lost if death penalty statutes were repealed.» «The process is so fatally flawed that the only solution lies in abolishing capital punishment. Most nations with which we share a common heritage have already taken this step. The relatives of the victim have the right to demand swift and sure punishment, but they do not have the right to demand death when the process is so severely flawed.»
	-- Charles B. Blackmar, former senior judge of Missouri's Supreme Court, (1) Kansas City Star, 7/1/2003; (2) St. Petersburg Times, 2/15/2003.
	«From this day forward, I no longer shall tinker with the machinery of death. I feel morally and intellectually obligated simply to concede that the death penalty experiment has failed. It is virtually self-evident to me now that no combination of procedural rules or substantive regulations ever can save the death penalty from its inherent constitutional deficiencies.» «I am more optimistic though, that this court will eventually conclude that the effort to eliminate arbitrariness while preserving fairness in the infliction of [death] is so plainly doomed to failure that is -- and the death penalty -- must be abandoned altogether. I may not live to see that day, but I have faith that eventually it will arrive.» «I cannot see any of these death penalty cases where there hasn't been a violation on the ground of either poverty or race. If we can ever get that straightened out, it will help. But, of course, the real answer to it is to do away with the death penalty.» «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, former U.S. Supreme Court Judge, (1) & (2) Callins v. Collins, 114 S.Ct.1127 (1994); (3) PBS Online NewsHour, 3/5/2004; (4) Herrera v. Collins 506 US 390 (1993).
	«Judicial politics has gotten so dirty in this state that your opponent in an election simply has to say that you're soft on crime because you haven't imposed the death penalty enough. People run for re-election on that basis, because the popular opinion in the state is, Let's hang 'em.»
	-- William Bowen Jr., former presiding judge of the Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals, criticizing the politization of the death penalty, New York Times, 6/16/2001.
	«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.» «When a country of more than 200 million people inflicts an unusually severe punishment no more than 50 times a year, the inference is strong that the punishment is not being regularly and fairly applied.» «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.» «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.» «I adhere to my view that the death penalty is in all circumstances cruel and unusual punishment prohibited by the Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments.» «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.» «If a punishment is unusually severe, if there is a strong probability that it is inflicted arbitrarily, if it is substantially rejected by contemporary society, and if there is no reason to believe that it serves any penal purpose more effectively than some less severe punishment, then the continued infliction of that punishment violates the command of the Clause that the State may not inflict inhuman and uncivilized punishments upon those convicted of crimes. Under these principles and this test, death is today a ‘cruel and unusual’ punishment.» «Perhaps the bleakest fact of all is that the death penalty is imposed not only in a freakish and discriminatory manner, but also in some cases upon defendants who are actually innocent.» «Death is not only an unusually severe punishment, unusual in its pain, in its finality and in its enormity, but it serves no penal purpose more effectively than a less severe punishment; therefore the principle inherent in the clause that prohibits pointless infliction of excessive punishment when less severe punishment can adequately achieve the same purposes invalidates the punishment.»
	-- William Brennan, former U.S. Supreme Court Justice; (5) Demosthenes v. Baal, 495 U.S. 731 (1990); (6) Constitutional Adjudication and the Death Penalty: A View From the Court, 100 Harvard Law Review 313 (1986); (7) Furman v. Georgia 408 US 238 (1972); (8) in: Brennan, W. Jr., Neither Victims nor Executioners, 8 Notre Dame J. of Law, Ethics & Public Policy 1, 4 (1994); (9) judicial opinion, 7/2/1976.
	«I note the continued difficulty of justifying capital punishment in terms of its ability to deter crime, to incapacitate offenders, or to rehabilitate criminals. Studies of deterrence are, at most, inconclusive.»
	-- Stephen Breyer, U.S. Supreme Court Justice, Ring v. Arizona (01-488), 6/24/2002.
	«There's no question, in my mind, that someone has slipped through the cracks and that an innocent person has been executed.»
	-- Jay Burnett, former Harris County criminal court judge.
	«Perhaps the whole business of the retention of the death penalty will seem to the next generation, as it seems to many even now, an anachronism too discordant to be suffered, mocking with grim reproach all our clamorous professions of the sanctity of life.»
	-- Benjamin Cardozo, former U.S. Supreme Court Justice.
	«To be honest, if I were a member of the legislative branch of government, I would probably vote to abolish the death penalty ... I would so vote because of the way the death penalty system works, it simply is not worth the aggravation it costs throughout the body politic.»
	-- Dale R. Cathell, Maryland Court of Appeals Judge, Baltimore Sun, 2/10/2002.
	«The right to life and dignity are the most important of all human rights and this must be demonstrated by the state in everything that it does, including the way it punishes criminals.» «We would be deluding ourselves if we were to believe that the execution of ... a comparatively few people each year ... will provide the solution to the unacceptably high rate of crime ... The greatest deterrent to crime is the likelihood that offenders will be apprehended, convicted and punished. It is that which is lacking in our criminal justice system.» «Everyone, including the most abominable of human beings, has a right to life, and capital punishment is therefore unconstitutional. Retribution cannot be accorded the same weight under our Constitution as the right to life and dignity.»
	-- Justice Arthur Chaskalson, President of the South African Constitutional Court, Chief Justice of the Republic of South Africa; (2) & (3) in a 1995 decision that ruled South Africa's death penalty unconstitutional.
	«I think the mood is changing in this country and people are realizing there are deficiencies in the system. We always think we got the right person, but the system is not infallible.» «I was looking at it as a young politician, with about 90 percent of my district supporting the death penalty. Now, from a judge's perspective and taking care of people's rights, I think it has a lot of flaws.»
	-- C. C. Cooke, Senior Texas State District Judge, who helped craft the state's death penalty law when he served as a state representative, Forth Worth Star Telegram, 7/24/2001.
	«The law must function as a model for society of how justice should be applied. If the law permits the taking of human life by its own hand, while asking the nation to respect human life, the law can no longer exercise its discipline over society.»
	-- Shigemitsu Dando, former Justice of the Supreme Court of Japan, professor emeritus, Tokyo University Faculty of Law, in "Toward the Abolition of the Death Penalty", 1996.
	«No one in a civilized society should be forced to live under conditions that force exposure to another person's bodily wastes. No matter how heinous the crime committed, there is no excuse for such living conditions.»
	-- Jerry Davis, federal judge, about Mississippi's death row, AP, 5/22/2003.
	«One searches in vain for the execution of any member of the affluent strate of our society.»
	-- William O. Douglas, former U.S. Supreme Court Justice.
	«Whether you're for it or against [the death penalty], I think the fact is that Oregon simply can't afford it.»
	-- James Ellis, Chief Criminal Judge, The Oregonian (Portland), 7/27/1987.
	«[Any death penalty law written by humankind] forever and always will be insufficient to decide who should live or who should die ... No matter how we try to dress it up -- doing it by lethal injection and very early in the morning -- it's still the ultimate, brutal act.» «I think those of us involved in prosecuting these [death penalty] cases have this uneasy notion that ... these cases are very time-consuming and very troublesome and take a lot of resources that might be better spent on other kinds of crimes.» «This legislation is about fundamental fairness, an issue that should not be controversial. The recent exonerations of Alan Gell and Darryl Hunt give clear evidence of the need for a study of our death penalty system. We should stop all executions until we can be sure that the death penalty is being used fairly in this state. We cannot risk the execution of an innocent person. We urge House leaders to permit a vote on this issue and allow the Democratic process to work.»
	-- James G. Exum, former North Carolina Chief Justice, (1) The News & Record, 8/8/2000; (3) North Carolina Coalition for a Moratorium Press Release, 6/29/2004.
	«In my own experience, I know of four persons convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to death, who were later found to be innocent ... long after the appellate process had been exhausted.»
	-- Harry Fogle, former Chief Judge of the Sixth Judicial Circuit, Florida.
	«Why, when we have bravely and nobly progressed so far in the recent past to create a decent, humane society, must we perpetuate the senseless barbarism of official murder?»
	-- Abe Fortas (1910-1982), former U.S. Supreme Court Justice, New York Times.
	«The issue of crime and punishment is easily exploited. I can't remember the last person in public office who said what I've said. They don't want to get labeled soft on crime. But I'm not going to be manipulated by anyone calling me soft on crime. The fact is, no one wants to stand up for the rights of defendants until they're in a jam themselves. No one wants to speak on behalf of the poor and disadvantaged unless they know someone who's poor and disadvantaged. I think that's an indictment of our society. I mean, how tough is tough enough? We have 2 million people incarcerated in this country. That is more than any other country, including China. In the case of capital punishment, I'm not talking about releasing these people. What we're talking about is not having the state engage in institutionalized violence. It sends the wrong message. It's not restorative justice, it's vengeance. It's not a deterrent. So what is it? It's retribution.» «Why do we kill people who kill people to prove that it's wrong to kill people? It's not about his soul. It's about our souls -- the community's soul. It deals with the sanctity of life.» «If it's not a deterrent, then what is it? Retribution? I don't want to be a part of that. I think when we evolve as a species, we won't do this anymore.»
	-- Daniel Gaul, Cleveland Judge, (1) Cleveland Free Times, 11/22/2000, (2) & (3) after the sentencing of Quisi Bryan, Cleveland Plain Dealer, 11/17/2001.
	«To support the death penalty as sound social policy strikes me as grossly misguided. Not only does the death penalty not deter murder, it fosters a culture of brutality, risks international condemnation, and transforms our country into a brutal pariah.» «For those who do not or can not address the moral issues, there remain the disturbing facts ... that our capital punishment fails disproportionately on minorities ... and sweeps some on innocent defendants ... in its wide nets...» «My experience, not atypical by any means, revealed some intractable trial court problems surrounding the death penalty. For one thing, prosecutorial discretion to seek death remained exactly what it had been when I was a prosecutor -- unstructured and capricious, with elected county attorneys usually deciding to pursue it at their whim in a high-profile case offering the prospect of political advantage. For another, capital codefendants were offered widely disparate plea bargains that, though intended to secure testimony against the supposedly more culpable offender, sometimes punished the less culpable and rewarded the more culpable.» «We should not be surprised then that law enforcement officials as well as criminological scholars regularly conclude that capital punishment offers no prospect of deterrence. ... To capital punishment enthusiasts and economic theorists alike who urge deterrence as a realistic goal of capital punishment, our execution history from colonial days to the present shows deterrence falling so far below these requirements as to be not only illusory but beyond recapture.»
	-- Rudolph J. Gerber, Judge of the Arizona State Court of Appeals, (1) Litigation Magazine, Spring 1998; (2) Arizona Republic, 10/11/2001; (3) "Survival Mechanisms: How America Keeps the Death Penalty Alive," 15 Stanford Law & Policy Review 363, 374 (2004); (4) "Economic and Historical Implications for Capital Punishment Deterrence", 18 Notre Dame Journal of Law, Ethics & Public Policy 437, 449-50 (2004).
	«It is horrible that in a civilized country the arbitrary imposition of revenge continues to exist ... We are completely out of step. We should be ashamed.»
	-- John J. Gibbons, former Chief Judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit, former Professor of Constitutional Law, Seton Hall University School of Law and a former President of the New Jersey State Bar Association.
	«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.»
	-- Ruth Bader Ginsburg, U.S. Supreme Court Justice, Associated Press, 4/10/2001.
	«The deliberate institutionalized taking of human life by the state is the greatest conceivable degradation to the dignity of the human personality.»
	-- Arthur J. Goldberg (1908-1990), former Supreme Court Justice, The Boston Globe, 8/16/1976, p. 17.
	«I felt at the outset that the death penalty was not constitutional... it is imperative that this law be applied evenhandedly and with balance and proportionality, that defendants cannot be selected for a death sentence as if struck by lightning. Our death penalty statutes and the way they’re applied cannot achieve those particular constitutional standards.»
	-- Alan B. Handler, former New Jersey Supreme Court Justice, The Newark Metro.
	«… the history of capital punishment for homicides … reveals continual efforts, uniformly unsuccessful, to identify before the fact those homicides for which the slayer should die…. Those who have come to grips with the hard task of actually attempting to draft means of channeling capital sentencing discretion have confirmed the lesson taught by history…. To identify before the fact those characteristics of criminal homicides and their perpetrators which call for the death penalty, and to express these characteristics in language which can be fairly understood and applied by the sentencing authority, appear to be tasks which are beyond present human ability.»
	-- John Marshall Harlan II, former U.S. Supreme Court Justice, McGautha v. California, 402 U.S. 183 (1971).
	«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 ... The prognosis for wrongly accused defendants facing capital charges is not improving. To the contrary, legislatures and the courts appear to have abandoned any genuine concern with insuring the fairness and reliability of the system. Achieving 'finality' in death cases, and doing so as expeditiously as posssible, have become the dominant goals in death penalty jurisprudence ... It is no answer to say that we are doing the best we can. If this is the best our state can do, we have no business sending people to their deaths.» «If the capital punishment debacle of the last few years has taught us anything, however, it is that adherence to the formal process, as it existed under the old law, can produce results that seem rational but are, in fact, completely unreliable. ... Our tolerance for prosecutorial gamesmanship and professional incompetence has evaporated. From now on, the success of prosecutors will be gauged by how well they cooperate in the search for truth and justice, not by the number of convictions they secure. It cannot be any other way. The old priorities do not work. When convictions are prized above justice, innocent men are sentenced to die. It has happened too often in Illinois. It must stop.»
	-- Moses W. Harrison, former Chief Justice of the Illinois Supreme Court, (1) People v. Bull, 11/10/1998; (2) People v. Hickey, 2001 Ill. LEXIS 1080.
	«I don't think you can work out a fair system. I agree with Justice Harry Blackmun ... that every effort had [already] been made to make it fair and reasonable and that it really couldn't be done.»
	-- Gerald Heaney, U.S. Court of Appeals Judge of the 8th Circuit.
	«[T]he objective indicia of consensus in this case — the rejection of the juvenile death penalty in the majority of States; the infrequency of its use even where it remains on the books; and the consistency in the trend toward abolition of the practice — provide sufficient evidence that today our society views juveniles, in the words Atkins used respecting the mentally retarded, as “categorically less culpable than the average criminal.”»
	-- Anthony M. Kennedy, U.S. Supreme Court Justice, in a decision that ruled the juvenile death penalty unconstitutional, Roper v. Simmons, 543 U.S. ____ (2005), 3/1/2005.
	«We must inaugurate the Age of Enlightenment and invincibility of society against crime pathology by creating the integrated man. All else, including death penalty, is criminological quackery and jurisprudential philistinism. Law must outlaw the delusive drug of the condemned cell. Our undertaking must be geared to this goal.» «Our penal code provides for capital punishment for wide range of offence. But sadly, the death penalty has never reduced these crimes in the country.»
	-- Justice V. R. Krishna Iyer, Judge of the Supreme Court of India.
	«We have to ask ourselves if it is not time for us to rethink whether or not capital punishment is a viable remedy for the crime of first degree murder.» «It doesn’t make any difference if you are in favor of capital punishment or if you are opposed to capital punishment. The fact of the matter is that as a viable penalty, capital punishment does not work at this time and has not worked in the State of Florida for many, many years.» «[T]here is no question in my mind, and I can tell you this having seen the dynamics of our criminal justice system over the many years that I have been associated with it, prosecutor, defense attorney, trial judge and Supreme Court Justice, that convinces me that we certainly have, in the past, executed those people who either didn't fit the criteria for execution in the State of Florida or who, in fact, were, factually, not guilty of the crime for which they have been executed. ... [Y]ou have to ask yourself, how many persons did we execute prior to the arrival of DNA evidence who would have been released, had we had that tool working for us 25, 30, 40, 50 years ago?»
	-- Gerald Kogan, former Chief Justice of the Florida Supreme Court.
	«It is time for the members of this Court to accept that there is simply no meaningful way to distinguish between one grotesque murder and another for the purpose of determining why one defendant has been granted a life sentence and another is awaiting execution. The very exercise of individual proportionality review stands on a fundamentally unstable pediment. It should thus be scrapped and a moratorium declared on the death penalty until a meaningful process is developed.»
	-- Virginia Long, New Jersey Supreme Court Justice.
	«We're running the county out of money.»
	-- Miron Love, State Judge, commenting on the cost of death penalty trials in Harris County, Texas, The Houston Chronicle, 8/15/1994.
	«When in Gregg v. Georgia the Supreme Court gave its seal of approval to capital punishment, this endorsement was premised on the promise that capital punishment would be administered with fairness and justice. Instead, the promise has become a cruel and empty mockery. If not remedied, the scandalous state of our present system of capital punishment will cast a pall of shame over our society for years to come. We cannot let it continue.» «While a public opinion poll obviously is of some assistance in indicating public acceptance or rejection of a specific penalty, its utility cannot be very great ... People who were fully informed as to the purposes of the death penalty and its liabilities would find the penalty shocking, unjust, and unacceptable.» «The question with which we must deal is not whether a substantial proportion of American citizens would today, if polled, [agree] that capital punishment is barbarously cruel, but whether they would find it to be so in light of all information presently available.» «I cannot believe that at this stage in our history, the American people would ever knowingly support purposeless vengeance. Thus, I believe that the great mass of citizens would conclude on the basis of the material already considered that the death penalty is immoral and therefore unconstitutional.»
	-- Thurgood Marshall, former U.S. Supreme Court Justice; (4) Furman v. Georgia 408 US 238 (1972).
	«I have no delusions of grandeur and I know my place in the judiciary. My oath requires me to apply the law as interpreted by the Supreme Court of the United States. I will continue to do as I am told until the Supreme Court concludes that the death penalty cannot be administered in a constitutional manner or our legislatures abolish the penalty. But lest there be any doubt, the idea that the death penalty is fairly and rationally imposed in this country is a farce.»
	-- Boyce Martin, judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, Moore v. Parker, No. 03-6105.
	«It seems to this court that now is the manifestly appropriate time to abandon the comfortable sentiments and reflexive responses so firmly and emotionally grasped by the proponents and opponents of the death penalty in New Jersey. If actual imposition of the death penalty requires such a Herculean effort as has been herein endured in terms of time, mental anguish and emotional expense, research, and writing, it strongly invites, nay, compels, the pragmatic conclusion that that penalty which imposes such an extravaganza, be finally legislatively or judicially annulled as opposed to being merely nibbled to death by state and federal ducks ... One might hope, instead, that this state and its citizens would, if no more than as a consummately practical deduction, simply resolve to set aside the comfortable pieties of the argument, eliminate the death element of the game and determine to maintain criminals of defendant's ilk in a secure place without possibility of parole.»
	-- Bill Mathesius, New Jersey Superior Court Judge, New Jersey v. Harris, Superior Ct. of N.J., Ind. No. 94-06-0605 (2002).
	«Human error, inequities, biases and personal ideologies create the problems that have caused my rejection of the death penalty. Because these frailties will not magically vanish, capital punishment cannot be implemented with any sense of balance or fairness, thus it must be abolished.»
	-- Donald A. McCartin, former Orange County Superior Court Judge and former death penalty supporter who sent 9 convicts to death row, Orange County Register, 6/24/2005.
	«It is very hard to find any empirical evidence that our societal security is strengthened by the use of capital punishment. States that have wielded the death penalty with vigor have crime rates as high or higher than states that have never authorized the death penalty. Despite many efforts to do so, it has proven almost impossible to quantify the efficacy of capital punishment. ... The main function of the death penalty is to vent societal spleen against those who commit certain heinous crimes.» «The more that variations on the theme are scrutinized, the more obvious it is that the real reason for executing people is the oldest of reasons: revenge, anger at the felon, the somewhat flawed interpretation of the biblical "Eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth." But if that is the real reason for remaining outside the fold of all Western nations who have reformed away the death penalty, then why don't we acknowledge this thorn in our legal system by its appropriate name? We should admit that we engage in legalized murder.» «It has always befuddled me that we can seriously assume that the members of our society who generally behave least rationally are going to engage in the rational process that underlies the deterrence theory.»
	-- Abner Mikva, former Chief Judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals in Washington, D.C.; (2) Shma Magazine, October 2002.
	«I really question whether the death penalty is worth having in terms of time and money. It has warped our court system. I think the time has come to decide whether it's worth the cost.»
	-- Burley Mitchell, former Chief Justice of the North Carolina Supreme Court, The News & Record, 8/8/2000.
	«[The] death penalty as a response to any criminal behavior no longer has validity and should be repealed, because it is impossible to administer with justice and fairness» «Gross numbers of executions are being carried out in some states or regions of the country. An alarming number of convictions have been found to be wrong, and the death penalty is unfairly inflicted upon the poor, minorities and the under-represented.»
	-- David A. Nichols, Washington State Superior Court Judge, Seattle Times, 11/8/2003.
	«[I]t's always the poor man who has no money or power who pays with his life, while another criminal may have committed an identical crime, but who is wealthy and powerful and escapes the chair or noose.»
	-- Frank Murphy, former Governor of Michigan, former U.S. Supreme Court Justice, condemning the execution of Anthony Chebatoris.
	«If statistics are any indication, the system may well be allowing some innocent defendants to be executed.» «More often than we want to recognize, some innocent defendants have been convicted and sentenced to death.» (in a speech to a women's law group in Minneapolis, noting that Minnesota does not have the death penalty) «You must breathe a big sigh of relief every day.» «After 20 years on (the) high court, I have to acknowledge that serious questions are being raised about whether the death penalty is being fairly administered in this country.»
	-- Sandra Day O'Connor, U.S. Supreme Court Justice.
	«The great deterrent to crime is not severity of punishment but certainty of conviction.»
	-- Lord Parker (1958-1971), Lord Chief Justice of England, 1966.
	«As we stand poised on history's doorstep, I find myself wondering if it's a step that we really want to take. Should the state be in the business of ending people's lives, no matter how reprehensible those people are? ... Knowing what I know now, my name wouldn't have been on it.»
	-- Paul Pfeifer, Ohio Supreme Court Justice, one of the authors of Ohio's death penalty law, distancing himself from capital punishment, Akron Beacon Journal web site, 2/18/1999.
	«The experience left me with one unavoidable conclusion: that a legal regime relying on the death penalty will inevitably execute innocent people - not too often, one hopes, but undoubtedly sometimes.»
	-- Michael Ponsor, U.S. District Judge, Boston Globe, 7/8/2001.
	«I have come to think that capital punishment should be abolished.» «[W]e are the only Western democracy that still has capital punishment. In my view it should be abolished. Let me add just this: It does not deter murders. It serves no purpose.»
	-- Lewis F. Powell, former U.S. Supreme Court Justice, (1) in: J. Jeffries, Justice Lewis F. Powell, Jr. 451 (1994) (quoting Powell).
	«In brief, the court found that the best available evidence indicates that, on the one hand, innocent people are sentenced to death with materially greater frequency than was previously supposed and that, on the other hand, convincing proof of their innocence often does not emerge until long after their convictions.»
	-- Jed Rakoff, U.S. District Judge.
	«In closing, I would observe that the miscarriage of justice that is about to occur is the product of the federal judiciary's elevation of procedure over justice, of speed and efficiency over fairness and due process. I regret that we have chosen that course in recent years, and believe that in doing so, we have severely tarnished our nation's justice system. It is the courts that should engender in all of the people an enduring commitment to liberty and fairness. That commitment will surely not be inspired by this case and others like it.» «We are presently barely able to handle our current caseload properly .... We are always looking for new fast-track procedures -- which means less careful, less thorough review of cases on the merits. ... [Soon] not only will we not be able to handle those death penalty cases properly, but we will not, in all likelihood, be able to handle any of our cases in a manner that is consistent with the standards that have traditionally marked the federal courts.»
	-- Stephen Reinhardt, U.S. Court of Appeals, 9th Circuit, (1) dissenting in the decision to allow Thomas Thompson to be executed in California; (2) Reinhardt, S.: "The Supreme Court, The Death Penalty, and the Harris Case" (1992) 102 Yale Law.Journal 205 at 217.
	«I am of the view that as per the provision of law, death penalty should be awarded in the rarest of rare cases. But, if you ask my opinion as a citizen of the country, I am for abolition of death penalty»
	-- Y. K. Sabarwal, designated Chief Justice of India, Deccan Herald, 10/20/2005.
	«Electrocution offends the evolving standards of decency that characterize a mature, civilized society.»
	-- Leah J. Sears, Georgia Supreme Court Justice, CBS News, 3/7/2001.
	«It is inconceivable to this court that Congress could have intended ... to provide less protection in a capital proceeding than in a non-capital proceeding.»
	-- William Sessions, U.S. District Judge, in a decision that ruled the federal death penalty unconstitutional.
	«Always in the consciousness of that justice is the question, "do I have it right?" A wrong call is irreversible because "death is different." The "do I have it right" question travels with you. You carry it with you during the workday, deliberations at case conference, your commute to and from work, before retiring at night, and on weekends. The question shadows you. However, normal shadows disappear at sundown, the "do I have it right" does not. You also carry a brief case filled with death case material home at night and on weekends. This brief case becomes your "constant companion" until the death case opinion is filed.»
	-- Fred N. Six, former Kansas Supreme Court Judge, Report of the Judicial Council Death Penalty Advisory Committee, 1/29/2004.
	«The risk of the wrong person being executed is intolerable in a civilized society.»
	-- John Sheehy, former Montana Supreme Court Judge.
	«It is abundantly clear that the Texas clemency procedure is extremely poor and certainly minimal. A flip of the coin would be more merciful than these votes.»
	-- Sam Sparks, U.S. District Judge, about the secretive clemency process in The Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles.
	«Under Nevada's interpretation of the treaty [International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights], the United States will be joining hands with such countries as Iran, Iraq, Bangladesh, Nigeria and Pakistan in approving death sentences for children.»
	-- Charles Springer, Chief Justice of the Nevada Supreme Court, dissenting from a decision allowing the death penalty for a defendant who was 16 at the time of the crime, Las Vegas Review Journal, 8/1/98.
	«The practice of executing such offenders is a relic of the past and is inconsistent with evolving standards of decency in a civilized society. We should put an end to this shameful practice.» «I think this country would be much better off if we did not have capital punishment.» «I really think it's a very unfortunate part of our judicial system and I would feel much, much better if more states would really consider whether they think the benefits outweigh the very serious potential injustice, because in these cases the emotions are very, very high on both sides and to have stakes as high as you do in these cases, there is the special potential for error.» «If the meaning of [the Eighth Amendment] had been frozen when it was originally drafted, it would impose no impediment to the execution of 7-year-old children today. ... The evolving standards of decency that have driven our construction of this critically important part of the Bill of Rights foreclose any such reading of the Amendment. In the best tradition of the common law, the pace of that evolution is a matter for continuing debate; but that our understanding of the Constitution does change from time to time has been settled since John Marshall breathed life into its text. If great lawyers of his day — Alexander Hamilton, for example — were sitting with us today, I would expect them to join Justice Kennedy's opinion for the Court. In all events, I do so without hesitation.» «The recent developments of reliable scientific evidentiary methods has made it possible to establish conclusively that a disturbing number of persons who had been sentenced to death were actually innocent.» «[W]ith the benefit of DNA evidence, we have learned that a substantial number of death sentences have been imposed erroneously ... [A] significant number of defendants in capital cases have not been provided with fully competent legal representation at trial.» «In sum, just as Justice White ultimately based his conclusion in Furman on his extensive exposure to countless cases for which death is the authorized penalty, I have relied on my own experience in reaching the conclusion that the imposition of the death penalty represents “the pointless and needless extinction of life with only marginal contributions to any discernible social or public purposes. A penalty with such negligible returns to the State [is] patently excessive and cruel and unusual punishment violative of the Eighth Amendment.”»
	-- John Paul Stevens, U.S. Supreme Court Justice, (1) about the practice of executing juvenile offenders, in a dissenting opinion joined by Justices Stephen Breyer, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and David Souter, Kevin Stanford's habeas corpus petition; (2) & (3) Chicago Sun Times, 5/12/2004; (4) concurring with an opinion delivered by Justice Kennedy, in a decision that outlawed the juvenile death penalty, Roper v. Simmons 543 U.S. ____ (2005); (5) during his opening assemble address at the 1996 American Bar Association annual meeting; (6) Associated Press, 8/7/2005; (7) in: Baze v. Rees., docket no. 07-5439.
	«As a matter of common sense, one would have to conclude, as the court in Massachusetts did, that since racial prejudice affects the death sentencing systems throughout the United States and since it has affected death sentencing under the previous statute, it will affect death sentences under the present statute as well.»
	-- Steward F. Hancock, former associate judge of New York's Court of Appeals, about New York's death penalty statute, New York Law Journal, 5/7/2002.
	«These death sentences are cruel and unusual in the same way that being struck by lightning is cruel and unusual. For, of all the people convicted of rapes and murders in 1967 and 1968, many just as reprehensible as these, the petitioners are among a capriciously selected random handful upon whom the sentence of death has in fact been imposed. My concurring Brothers have demonstrated that, if any basis can be discerned for the selection of these few to be sentenced to die, it is the constitutionally impermissible basis of race. ... I simply conclude that the Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments cannot tolerate the infliction of a sentence of death under legal systems that permit this unique penalty to be so wantonly and so freakishly imposed.»
	-- Potter Stewart, U.S. Supreme Court Justice, Furman v. Georgia, 408 U.S. 238 (1972), 6/29/1972.
	«I oppose capital punishment for reasons both personal and theoretical. There is no convincing statistical analysis showing it has any more deterrent value than life imprisonment. This is what you would expect since almost no murders are accomplished by people who calmly weigh the risk of against the possible benefits of whatever skullduggery they are involved in at the time they kill.»
	-- Jack B. Weinstein, Senior U.S. District Court judge in the Eastern District of New York, New York Law Journal, 8/23/2000.
	«The risk of racial prejudice infecting a capital sentencing proceeding is especially serious in light of the complete finality of the death sentence.» «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 is exacted with great infrequency even for the most atrocious crimes and ... there is no meaningful basis for distinguishing the few cases in which it is imposed from the many cases in which it is not.»
	-- Byron R. White, former U.S. Supreme Court Justice, former U.S. Deputy Attorney General; (3) Furman v. Georgia 408 US 238 (1972).
	«In the past decade, substantial evidence has emerged to demonstrate that innocent individuals are sentenced to death, and undoubtedly executed, much more often that previously understood.» «If juries continue to reject the death penalty in the most egregious federal cases, the courts will have significant objective evidence that the ultimate sanction is not compatible with contemporary standards of decency.»
	-- Mark L. Wolf, federal judge.
	«Some have suggested that clemency on a large scale would disrespect the process and the people who worked hard in that process, including the judges, jurors, and prosecutors. In fact, all of us involved in the workings of the legal system are bound by a fundamental duty to seek justice, to honor our highest principles. That same concern for our highest values that motivates judges and jurors may well counsel the use of clemency to restore confidence in a system tarnished by inaccuracy and unfairness. Broad use of clemency is not a defiance or disrespect of the process, but rather an essential part of that process. It is not an abuse but rather a duty of the executive to commute sentences if systemic flaws have undermined justice.»
	-- John F. Cirricone, Richard J. Fitzgerald, Julian Frazin, Myron T. Gomberg, Moses Harrison, Howard R. Kaufman, George N. Leighton, Francis X. Mahoney, Prentice H. Marshall, Abner J. Mikva, Martha Mills, Sheila M. Murphy, R. Eugene Pincham, Dom J. Rizzi, John B. Roe, Anthony Scariano, Seymour Simon, Shelvin Singer, Marjan P. Staniec, Earl E. Strayhorn, Harold W. Sullivan, retired judges, in an open letter to Illinois Governor George H. Ryan, urging him to grant clemency to the inmates on Illinois' death row, 12/1/2002.
	«...in Canada, the death penalty has been rejected as an acceptable element of criminal justice. Capital punishment engages the underlying values of the prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment. It is final and irreversible. Its imposition has been described as arbitrary and its deterrent value has been doubted.» «There is no convincing argument that exposure ... to death in prison by execution advances Canada's public interest in a way that the alternative, eventual death in prison by natural causes, would not.» «Legal systems have to live with the possibility of error. The unique feature of capital punishment is that it puts beyond recall the possibility of correction. In recent years, aided by the advances in the forensic sciences, including DNA testing, the courts and governments in this country and elsewhere have come to acknowledge a number of instances of wrongful convictions for murder despite all of the careful safeguards put in place for the protection of the innocent.»
	-- Supreme Court of Canada, United States v. Burns, 2/15/2001.