For fifty years Private Eye has pretty much in most issues exposed a miscarriage of justice, and a lot of them have been murders. Over the years, large numbers of these cases have been found to be entirely wrong, and the men convicted -- almost always men, there was a couple of women -- have been found innocent, so we would have killed those people, and in some of those very high profile cases which involved terrorism cases, we would have made very dangerous new martyrs by executing people who turned out not to have committed the murders involved. So on a purely practical basis, whatever you think it says about the civilised nature of your society or not, I think it would be incredibly dangerous to have capital punishment back.
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On capital punishment in the United Kingdom. Question Time, BBC, 22 September 2011Ian Hislop
To me, capital punishment is a form of societal self-defense. It should not be employed indiscriminately, but in cases of the most heinous crimes, the death penalty may be the only appropriate punishment. Some people believe it is right to take a life to save the life of someone else, but they would not vote to take the life of a convicted criminal, no matter how horrible the crime. Others believe that killing another person for any reason is simply wrong. I respect those opinions, but I disagree with them. I'm convinced that government has a duty to promote community defense. The death penalty, when applied in appropriate cases, can be a strong deterrent to crime. It is certainly a deterrent to the convicted criminal sentenced to death, and it is also a deterrent to other potential capital offenders.
John Ashcroft
Justice Blackmun begins his statement [declaring Blackmun's opposition to capital punishment] by describing with poignancy the death of a convicted murderer by lethal injection. He chooses, as the case in which to make that statement, one of the less brutal of the murders that regularly come before us, the murder of a man ripped by a bullet suddenly and unexpectedly, with no opportunity to prepare himself and his affairs, and left to bleed to death on the floor of a tavern. The death-by-injection which Justice Blackmun describes looks pretty desirable next to that. It looks even better next to some of the other cases currently before us, which Justice Blackmun did not select as the vehicle for his announcement that the death penalty is always unconstitutional, for example, the case of the 11-year-old girl raped by four men and then killed by stuffing her panties down her throat. See McCollum v. North Carolina. How enviable a quiet death by lethal injection compared with that!
Antonin Scalia
Tawana Brawley told her story many months before I got involved—and many others got involved, Bill Cosby, and many others, who have never refuted the story. I don't refute it now. I believe … something happened to Tawana Brawley.… There is a problem in this country, that a lot of people don’t believe women. A lot of people don’t believe young women. I took the risk, as I have in most of the civil rights cases I have fought, to stand up for the victim. In this particular case, a jury did not believe her.
Al Sharpton
Except for cases that clearly involve a homicidal maniac, the police like to believe murders are committed by those we know and love, and most of the time they're right--a chilling thought when you sit down to dinner with a family of five. All those potential killers passing their plates.
Sue Grafton
In our private conversations, Judge Cedarbaum has pointed out to me that seminal decisions in race and sex discrimination cases have come from Supreme Courts composed exclusively of white males. I agree that this is significant but I also choose to emphasize that the people who argued those cases before the Supreme Court which changed the legal landscape ultimately were largely people of color and women.
Sonia Sotomayor
Hislop, Ian
Hitchcock, Alfred
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