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.
I was a supporter and believer in the death penalty, but I've begun to see that this system doesn't work and it isn't functional. It costs an obscene amount of money.
Capital punishment is against the best judgment of modern criminology and, above all, against the highest expression of love in the nature of God.
From this day forward, I no longer shall tinker with the machinery of death. . . . I fell morally and intellectually obligated simply to concede that the death penalty experiment has failed.
Now I am dedicating that life to campaigning against the death penalty and raising awareness about human rights.
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.
The taking of life is too absolute, too irreversible, for one human being to inflict on another, even when backed by legal process. . . Where the death penalty persists, conditions for those awaiting execution are often horrifying, leading to aggravated suffering.
The death penalty only should be - if you agree with it, which I don't, only allowed for murder. You have to murder someone to get the death penalty.
The death penalty experiment has failed.
The costs can't be borne by smaller counties particularly, so if the crime occurs in a large county you might be charged with the death penalty, in a smaller county you're not. That raises some significant questions about fairness.
I am haunted by the demon of error - error in determining guilt and error in determining who among the guilty deserves to die.
I haven't committed all the crimes in my movies, I would have gotten the death penalty many years ago if I had.
I wonder if these death penalty proponents would still hold that it's worth some risk of error if it were their loved one who was murdered by the state, though innocent.
The abolition of the death penalty is making us a civilized society. It shows we actually do mean business when we say we have reverence for life.
I have come to think that capital punishment should be abolished.
The death penalty serves no one. It doesn't serve the victims. It doesn't serve prevention. It's truly all about retribution. . . . There comes a time when you have to ask if a penalty that is so permanent can be available in such an imperfect system. The only guarantee against executing the innocent is to do away with the death penalty.
Standing alone among great democratic nations in imposing the death penalty is another moral decision that Americansare being forced to confront.
I'm pro-death penalty, but what I have not seen is anybody that would mock someone on death row.
A humane and generous concern for every individual, his health and his fulfillment, will do more to soothe the savage heart than the fear of state-inflicted death, which chiefly serves to remind us how close we remain to the jungle.
I think the death penalty's easier than life in prison.