"The question with what we must deal is
not whether a substancial proportion of American citizens would today,
if polled, opine that capital punishment barbarously cruel, but whether
they would find it to be so in light of all information presently available"'
-Justice Thurgod Marshall
"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 victime of the date at which he would inflict
a horrible death on him and who, fromt he moment onward, had confied him
at his mercy for months. Such a monster is not encountered in private
life".
-Albert Camus
"It is the deed that teaches, not the name we
give it. Murder and capital punishment are not opposites that cancel
one another, but similars that breed their kind"
- George Bernard Shaw
"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."
-Former US Supreme Court Justice Harry BBlackmun
"Until the infallibility of human judgement shall
have been proved to me, I shall persist in demanding the abolition of the
death penalty." -Marquis de Lafayette