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But no, I just don't think with the scientific evidence now -- I think I read an article yesterday on the death penalty, and 68 percent of the time they make mistakes. And it’s so racist, too. I think more than half the people getting the death penalty are poor blacks. This is the one place, the one remnant of racism in our country is in the court system, enforcing the drug laws and enforcing the death penalty. I don’t even know, but I wonder how many of those, how many have been executed? Over 200, I wonder how many were minorities? You know, if you're rich, you usually don't meet the death penalty.
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Interview with the Concord Monitor Editorial Board, August 18, 2011

 

Ron Paul

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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

 

How come life in prison doesn't mean life? Until it does, we're not ready to do away with the death penalty. Stop thinking in terms of "punishment" for a minute and think in terms of safeguarding innocent people from incorrigible murderers. Americans have a right to go about their lives without worrying about these people being back out on the street. So until we can make sure they're off the street permanently, we have to grit our teeth and put up with the death penalty. So we need to work toward making a life sentence meaningful again. If life meant life, I could, if you'll excuse the pun, live without the death penalty.
We don't have it here in Minnesota, thank God, and I won't advocate to get it. But I will advocate to make life in prison mean life. I don't think I would want the responsibility for enforcing the death penalties. There's always the inevitable question of whether someone you gave the order to execute might truly have been innocent.

 

Jesse Ventura

 

From this day forward, I no longer shall tinker with the machinery of death. For more than 20 years, I have endeavored - indeed, I have struggled - along with a majority of this Court, to develop procedural and substantive rules that would lend more than the mere appearance of fairness to the death penalty endeavor. Rather than continue to coddle the Court's delusion that the desired level of fairness has been achieved and the need for regulation eviscerated, I feel morally and intellectually obligated simply to concede that the death penalty experiment has failed.

 

Harry Blackmun

 

A man convicted of murder is twenty times more likely than a woman convicted of murder to receive the death penalty... Since the 1976 reinstatement of the death penalty, 120 men—and only 1 woman—have actually been executed. The woman, from North Carolina, said she preferred to be executed… In North Carolina, a man who commits second-degree murder receives a sentence on average of 12.6 years longer than a woman who commits second-degree murder.

 

Warren Farrell

 

There is a piece of legislation floating around where if two people are witnesses to any murder you commit, you get executed right away. That means that if there are at least two credible eyewitnesses to a murder you committed, you don't wait on Death Row for 15 years, Jack! You go straight to the front of the line! Other states are trying to abolish the death penalty. My state's putting in the express lane.

 

Ron White