capital punishment Quotes

“It seems to me a very unjust thing to take away a man’s life for a little money, for nothing in the world can be of equal value with a man’s life.”

“I said, “That is my father.” I stood there looking at him. What a waste! Tom Chaney would pay for this! I would not rest easy until that Louisiana cur was roasting and screaming in hell!”

“I have since learned that Judge Isaac Parker watched all the hangings from an upper window in the Courthouse. I suppose he did this from a sense of duty. There is no knowing what’s in a man’s heart.”

“And a tough, strutty little man said, “I believe in capital punishment. It’s like the Bible says—an eye for an eye. And even so we’re two pair short!”

“If a man had by unheard-of and excruciating tortures destroyed your father, your mother, your betrothed,—a being who, when torn from you, left a desolation, a wound that never closes, in your breast,—do you think the reparation that society gives you is sufficient when it interposes the knife of the guillotine between the base of the occiput and the trapezal muscles of the murderer, and allows him who has caused us years of moral sufferings to escape with a few moments of physical pain?”