97 Pro Death Penalty Quotes by Attorneys from the U.S.A
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The American public possesses a deep-seated sense of right and wrong. It seems that no matter how hard the liberal media and the anti-death penalty elitists try, average citizens continue to believe that those who commit the most heinous murders should face the possibility of the most serious punishment. America’s prosecutors feel that people who violate our laws should suffer the consequences of those acts, and they will continue to do all they can to see that law-breakers are held responsible for their criminal acts. The safety of the public is job # 1 for prosecutors. That is what the public expects and wants. “Do you feel safe in downtown Detroit? You shouldn't be. Beyond the
obvious specific deterrent of executing a killer so he can't kill again, the
most recent studies (since 2000) come from a broad base of economists and non-ideological
scientists. Their studies include authors who personally oppose capital
punishment but cannot deny the findings of their research.”
“Citing a high murder rate in Texas makes as little sense as citing Michigan or the District of Columbia - both places with much higher than average murder rate - as examples of how. Comparing the United States with other countries is equally pointless. There are very stable countries like Switzerland or Japan with low murder rates (one has the death penalty, the other not) or point to countries like Brazil with murder rates much worse than the United States.” “As someone
who has tried both capital and non-capital murder cases, as well as defending
similar cases, I can say from direct knowledge that the costs of capital
punishment are directly related to the amount of due process given the
defendant. The costs exist because we want to be very sure to guarantee that
the defendant has every protection. “What Amnesty International is not telling you
is that polling done on capital punishment shows that consistently 65 to 85% of
Americans support capital punishment in some cases since the mid-1970s. Support
peaked in the 1980s, decreased slightly to about 65% in 2000, but remains about
70%. If the question is asked "Is there ANY crime that merits the death
penalty" Americans say yes at a rate of 82%. How Many Innocent Victims are Too Many? There has
never been any doubt that capital punishment is a specific deterrent. The
killer who dies cannot kill again, but in the last decade a series of academic
studies have shown that executions mean less murder, less innocent victims.
This is the number rarely bandied about by those who fashion themselves
“abolitionists.” They claim the moral high ground and point to a system they
claim is fatally flawed. But they do not speak of what happens when society
fails to incapacitate the worst of the worst killers. Since the death penalty
was reinstated by the United States Supreme Court in 1976 there have been about
600,000 murders in America and just over 1000 killers executed. The Idea that Many People on Death Row are Innocent is Nonsense: One of the most pernicious urban legends perpetrated by those who oppose capital punishment is that innocent people have been executed and that there have a large number of exonerations. Exoneration means innocent and while there is no question the justice system makes mistakes they are extremely rare. Of almost 10,000 people sentenced to death over the last 30 years exactly 4 have been removed from death row because DNA showed it extremely unlikely they committed the crimes of which they were convicted. The Innocence Project points to just over 200 DNA exonerations in all kinds of serious felonies. The question raised by Justice Scalia in his concurrence in the case of Kansas vs. Marsh was out of what universe. Those are 200 DNA exonerations out of tens of millions of rapes and murder cases. That would mean an error rate of about one ten thousandths of one percent or putting it another way a success rate of around 99.99%. No human endeavor is without risk and every year tens of thousands of people are killed by mistakes by pharmacists and doctors. Yet we don’t stop medicine or surgery, we seek to improve it and reduce the risk.The Gary Graham case offers fodder to those who contend that the United States has gotten carried away with enthusiasm for capital punishment. But Joshua Marquis, a member of the board of directors of the National District Attorneys Association, said that the adversarial justice system remains a sound forum on which juries and judges can weigh matters like eyewitness testimony and circumstantial evidence and make sound convictions short of scientific certainty. ``DNA can be a marvelous forensic tool, but it is not a magic bullet,'' Marquis said. ``We must never forget the other, massively larger part of this risk-benefit analysis _ the thousands of truly innocent victims who die at the hands of criminals that the legal system has failed to hold accountable.” ``In this country we have an incredibly elaborate appellate system that recognizes that police, prosecutors, judges, and juries are not infallible,'' he said. ``Opponents . . . are attempting to reshape the discussion in the form of a new urban myth: that our justice system is growing increasingly reckless in its zeal to execute and, worse yet, that significant numbers of innocents are ending up on death row. This is a myth in search of a crisis that doesn't exist.''
AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL: “The U.S. in Bad Company.” Only a handful of countries still execute more prisoners each year than the U.S., including countries such as China, Iran and Saudi Arabia. Is this the company that we want to keep? JOSHUA MARQUIS, District Attorney, Media Commentator: “America is NOT a Rogue State.” Many democracies maintain capital punishment, not the least being India and Japan. The death penalty was abolished in Europe and Euro-centric countries because the European Union made abolition an absolute prerequisite to membership. Polls of most western European counties show the people of those nations agree with most Americans that the death penalty is appropriate in the worst murders. Even some of the states that abolished capital punishment still reserve it as a possibility for war crimes or crimes against humanity, such as the execution of Nazi war criminals during the Nuremberg Trials in the late 1940s. AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL: “The Death Penalty Makes Too Many Mistakes.”We know that many innocent people have been sent to death row - over 125 have now been released from death row in the U.S. due to evidence of their wrongful convictions. The death penalty is also riddled with racial and economic bias and geographical arbitrariness. JOSHUA MARQUIS, District Attorney, Media Commentator: “Innocence on Death Row Rarer than Rabies.” In discussing capital punishment, words matter. But the idea that death row is "riddled" with innocents is ridiculous. There is not a single case in the modern era of capital punishment (since 1976) where a person executed has turned out to be factually innocent. There have been 5 people freed from death row because of DNA evidence and 9 more who had ALREADY had their death sentence removed who were later cleared by DNA. Of the approximately 10,000 sentenced to death in the U.S. since 1976 perhaps 30 of them were actually innocent. The larger question is how many innocent people will die because we fail to incarerate or execute killers. Cass Sunstein of the University of Chicago Law School - a well known "progressive" - makes the case best in "Is Capital Punishment Morally Required, A Life for Life Trade-off." Sunstein refers to a series of studies (http://www.cjlf.org/deathpenalty/DPDeterrence.htm ) that show that failure to condemn killers results in an unacceptable number of new victims. Parting
Thoughts A Just Punishment (Oregon
State Bar Bulletin — MAY 2002) - One need not practice
criminal law to recognize that even in a crime as bad as murder, these are
particularly horrific and are denominated as aggravated murder under Oregon
law. Parting Thoughts A Just Punishment (Oregon State Bar Bulletin — MAY 2002) - Far from signaling ambivalence, these lengthy delays and retrials bear witness to the extreme care given to the most extreme penalty. The death penalty is seldom sought by Oregon prosecutors and even more rarely imposed by juries. It is properly reserved for the worst of the worst. Oregonians understand that there exist some crimes so unspeakable, some men so evil, that a just punishment is the forfeiture of the killer's own life. The Myth Of Innocence published in the Journal of Criminal Law &
Criminology - March 31, 2005 Northwestern University School of Law, Chicago,
Illinois - In the last ten years the violent crime rate
in America, including the murder rate, has decreased dramatically. A series of
recent studies by economists showed an undeniable correlation between the death
penalty and deterrence.
The Myth Of Innocence published in the Journal of Criminal Law &
Criminology - March 31, 2005 Northwestern University School of Law, Chicago,
Illinois - Some claim that a civilized society must be
prepared to allow ten guilty men to walk free in order to spare one innocent.
But the well-organized and even better-funded abolitionists cannot point to a
single case of a demonstrably innocent person executed in the modem era of
American capital punishment.
The Myth Of Innocence published in the Journal of Criminal Law &
Criminology - March 31, 2005 Northwestern University School of Law, Chicago,
Illinois - Instead, let's tally the additional victims
of the freed: Nine, killed by Kenneth McDuff, who had been sentenced to die for
child murder in Texas and then was freed on parole after the death penalty laws
at the time were overturned. One, by Robert Massie of California, also
sentenced to die and also paroled. Massie rewarded the man who gave him a job
on parole by murdering him less than a year after getting out of prison. One,
by Richard Marquette, in Oregon, sentenced to "life" (which until
1994 meant about eight years in Oregon) for abducting and then dismembering
women.137 he did so well in a woman-free environment (prison) that he was
released-only to abduct, kill and dismember women again.138 Two, by Carl Cletus
Bowles, in Idaho, guilty of kidnapping nine people and the murder of a police
officer. Bowles escaped during a conjugal visit with a girlfriend, only to
abduct and murder an elderly couple.
The victims of these men didn't have "close calls" with death. They are dead. Murdered. Without saying goodbye to their loved ones. Without appeal to the state or the media or Hollywood or anyone's heartstrings. The
Myth Of Innocence published in the Journal of Criminal Law
& Criminology - March 31, 2005 Northwestern University School of Law,
Chicago, Illinois – Discouraged over polls that have
consistently shown public support for capital punishment between sixty-five and
eighty-five percent over the last quarter century,140 proponents of the death
penalty have decided to tap into an understandable horror that people who are
truly innocent of the murder of which they stand convicted are on death row.
They are turning into doe eyed innocents the few murderers who have slipped
through one of the countless cracks in the law afforded to capital defendants.
They want us to believe that any one of us could be snatched at any time from
our daily freedoms and sentenced to die because of a false and coerced
confession, police corruption, faulty eyewitness identification, botched
forensics, prosecutorial misconduct, and shoddy and ill-paid defense counsel. The Myth Of Innocence published in the Journal of Criminal Law &
Criminology - March 31, 2005 Northwestern University School of Law, Chicago,
Illinois - For those who believe that no rate of error
is acceptable, the death penalty can never be "reformed"
sufficiently, despite the claims that they are seeking only to insure a fairer
system. Yet these same advocates urge the substitution of life without parole,
claiming (as is sometimes true) that many inmates consider a life sentence to
be worse than execution. Peel back the layers of this reckoning and you'll find
these advocates claiming that it is just as horrible to threaten to take away
the remaining days of a murderer's life, and therefore we must abolish all long
prison sentences as well as the death penalty. In a debate at the American Bar
Association's annual convention in Chicago in 2001, I confronted Nadine
Strossen of the American Civil Liberties Union on that very question. I asked
her, if I would-for the sake of argument-abandon my support for capital
punishment, would she, on behalf of the ACLU, affirm her support for sentences
of life without possibility of parole? She honestly responded that she could
not; that it was an ever-changing political and moral environment. And therein
lies the dilemma. If there are people so dangerous, so evil that that they can
never be trusted to walk among us, how will we answer to their next victims?
What level of risk are the j abolitionists willing to accept for those who will
die at the hands of a McDuff, a Marquette, or a Massie?
The Myth Of Innocence published
in the Journal of Criminal Law & Criminology - March 31, 2005 Northwestern
University School of Law, Chicago, Illinois - The
number of death sentences is, in fact, decreasing. Criminal sentences for
crimes other than murder have become tougher, terms of imprisonment more
certain, and perhaps more significantly, the rate of murder is down overall.
Prosecutors and juries are properly and appropriately becoming even more
discriminating about determining who should die for their crimes. It is a
journey not taken lightly. The Myth Of Innocence published
in the Journal of Criminal Law & Criminology - March 31, 2005 Northwestern
University School of Law, Chicago, Illinois - Some may
wonder why it should matter if the number of people who were genuinely
exonerated is 30 or 150. Many will claim that even one innocent person put to
death is an intolerable number, but those who make that argument are demanding
an impossibility-a perfect system. Such errors are episodic, not epidemic, and
merit the most rigorous review, precisely as occurs in 21st century capital
jurisprudence. The Myth Of Innocence published in the Journal of Criminal Law & Criminology - March 31, 2005 Northwestern University School of Law, Chicago, Illinois - In a subject as emotionally charged as the death penalty these claims must be made precisely-by all sides. Intellectual honesty is a critical ingredient to a meaningful discussion of this important subject. Death penalty opponents risk losing their credibility when they are reckless with the truth. American justice is a work in progress, and those of us charged with administering it are well aware that it needs constant improvement. But nothing is gained by deluding the public into believing that the police and prosecutors are trying to send innocent people to prison. Any experienced defense lawyer will concede that he would starve if he accepted only "innocent" clients. Americans should be far more worried about the wrongfully freed than the wrongfully convicted. - The Innocent and the Shammed January 26, 2006 He's a murderer. He should die. December 4, 2005 Los Angeles Times - There are heartfelt moral and religious reasons to oppose
capital punishment, but holding up Stanley Tookie Williams as a symbol of
redemption is absurd and obscene. It is especially offensive to his victims'
families, whose names the celebrities championing his cause probably don't
know. News coverage rarely mentions Albert Owens or the Yang family, all gunned
down by Williams in a series of crimes in 1979. The Crips' reputed co-founder
also bears moral responsibility for the deaths of countless young black men.
He's
a murderer. He should die. December 4, 2005 Los Angeles Times - According to a Gallup poll in May, nearly 75% of Americans
support capital punishment for murderers. There are some murderers so heinous
and so evil that removing them is the measure of the severity of their
violation of the social contract. Williams qualifies. Thursday 9 June 2011 - Clatsop County Attorney Josh Marquis, a death penalty proponent who has prosecuted two capital cases, said capital punishment is an important tool for prosecutors. The threat of a death sentence helps prosecutors secure plea bargains for life without parole, he said, and Oregon hasn't had a history of imposing the death penalty on innocent people. "It is rarely asked for, it is rarely used and it is rarely imposed," Marquis said. Sunday 9 October 2011 - Efforts aimed at persuading Oregonians to dump the death penalty are doomed to fail, according to proponents of capital punishment. As they tell it, nothing has changed since 2002, when death penalty opponents shut down a proposed ballot measure to abolish capital punishment after polling showed it would not pass. "Polls show that between 65 and 85 percent of Oregonians support capital punishment," said Clatsop County District Attorney Josh Marquis, a death penalty proponent and author on the topic. A quiet majority favoring the death penalty lacks the "fevered" intensity of those who want to abolish it, Marquis said. "The zealousness on one side is not matched by the zealousness on the other," he said. "I know there are some crazy people that show up at the pen when there's an execution and wave signs saying 'roast in hell' and 'burn baby burn,' stuff like that. But most people who are pro death penalty are somewhat ambivalent about it because it's very serious business." Kitzhaber allowed the executions of Wright and Moore to occur in 1996 and 1997 during his previous administration. Marquis thinks Kitzhaber should take the same non-intervention stance with Haugen. "When Mr. Wright and Mr. Moore came up, his position was, 'Look, this is the law, and I'm not going to interfere in it, absent of a tremendous injustice'," he said. "Well, the only injustice that the opponents can point to (in Haugen's case) is, they don't like the death penalty." "I don't think Oregon voters voted for it because they thought it would save them money," said Clatsop County District Attorney Josh Marquis, a proponent of the death penalty. He says the money argument doesn't really wash when criminals convicted to life in prison don't fight any less than those facing execution. "They still have expensive $300,000 trials, and they still appeal," Marquis said. In fact, they will appeal forever just like the people on death row." [Wednesday 23 November 2011] The unique intersection of democracy and justice that is the death penalty must be respected. [Column: Governor should uphold law By JOSH MARQUIS for the Daily Astorian | Posted: Thursday, December 8, 2011 10:30 am] Some claim
life without parole is an adequate substitute. What they fail to note are the
people, both inside and outside prison, who die at the hands of convicted
murderers. Nor do they seem to comprehend that the only reason many terrible
murders are resolved with a plea to a "true life sentence" is the
specter of a possible death sentence. [For select few, death is just 11
December 2005] Opponents
claim the death penalty is arbitrary. So is homicide. Thus, each case must be
examined individually, first by a prosecutor, then by a jury in two phases,
then by more than a decade (on average) of appeals. [For select few, death
is just 11 December 2005] We all agree: 10 guilty men should go free to prevent one innocent from being wrongly convicted. But how about 10,000 guilty, or 100,000, going free? How many victims become too many? What do we say to the victims of killers like Kenneth McDuff, Robert Massie or Carl Cletus Bowles, all murderers doing life who got out and killed again? [For select few, death is just 11 December 2005] Maybe
someday we can start having an honest debate in this country over the morality
of capital punishment rather than constantly refuting the chimera of the
wrongfully convicted. [Guilty
Again! Sunday 15 January 2006] Even according to Barry Scheck's Innocence Project there have only been 174 DNA exonerations for ALL crimes, more than 90% of which were not murder, let alone death penalty cases. In fact, the number of inmates taken off death row specifically because DNA cleared them is....FIVE. An additional nine inmates who were once on death row were eventually fully exonerated by DNA evidence. Some might say, 14 or 140, it doesn't make a difference. That makes as much sense as being told you have a 1% mortality risk from a surgical procedure versus a 10% risk. [How many innocent victims is “a few”? Tuesday 14 March 2006] |
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“A two and a half-year-old girl was kidnapped, raped, sodomized,
tortured and mutilated with vise grips over six hours. Then she was strangled
to death. Her assailant, Theodore Frank, according to court records and his own
admissions, had already molested more than 100 children during a 20-year
period. A sentence of death is the only appropriate punishment for such a
serial assailant committing such an extraordinarily heinous crime.” “In our understandable desire to be fair and to protect the rights of offenders in our criminal justice system, let us never ignore or minimize the rights of their victims. The death penalty is a necessary tool that reaffirms the sanctity of human life while assuring that convicted killers will never again prey upon others.” |
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Do you support the death penalty?
Why or why not? I took an oath to uphold
the laws of the State of Washington, which includes due consideration of the
death penalty option in the appropriate aggravated first degree murder case.
There are extreme cases when a jury should have this option. "Cal Brown's sadistic and predatory crimes rank him among the
worst of the worst criminals in our state, and there can be no doubt about his
guilt," King County Prosecutor Dan
Satterberg said in a statement. "If we are serious
about having a death penalty in the State of Washington then it is time to
carry out the sentence." Thursday 1 September 2011 - Satterberg currently is prosecuting two death penalty cases, one involving the murders of six members of a family and the other a murder of a Seattle police officer. Neither case has gone to trial, yet the cost of defending them has hit $4.3 million and keeps going up. Because all three defendants are indigent, that cost is born by taxpayers. Budget shortfalls have forced Satterberg to cut his department by 51 employees including 36 deputy prosecutors. Nationwide, death penalty sentences have dropped 60 percent since 2000 from 224 to 112 last year. Experts say there are several factors including more skeptical juries, better defense teams and fewer death sentences being sought by district attorneys. Satterberg blames what he calls the death penalty "industry." “They want to drive up the cost,” Satterberg says, “They want to delay the cases forever, only to turn around and use those arguments why we should get rid of the death penalty.” |
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"It was pretty obvious he committed the crime," said Bexar County District Attorney Susan Reed, who prosecuted the case and also witnessed the punishment. "He went on a killing spree. He's an evil person." [Referring to the execution of Frank Garcia on Thursday 27 October 2011] Bexar County District Attorney Susan Reed, who prosecuted the case, attended the execution in Huntsville, Texas, according to a spokesman for the Texas Department of Criminal Justice. Earlier in the week, she called the murders "a huge tragedy." "If there was ever a poster child for the death penalty, this is the case," Reed told Reuters. "Hector Garza, a fine officer; Jessica Garcia, a woman who is trying to leave an abusive situation, and this huge tragedy happens to all of them." [Referring to the execution of Frank Garcia on Thursday 27 October 2011] |
Referring to the upcoming execution of Oba Chandler on Friday 11 November 2011 - It will be the first time Bartlett, the chief assistant state attorney for Pinellas and Pasco counties, has watched a man die at the hands of the state. "I really have no compunction or reservations in seeing this guy executed," Bartlett says. "If Florida is going to have a death penalty, this individual is the poster child for having it.” Bartlett said this is a part of the criminal justice system he's never experienced. He has a professional curiosity to see how it's done — and to see this particular sentence carried out. "I don't take any pleasure in seeing someone take their last breath," Bartlett said. "But this particular individual, I don't have any reservations about. He has shown throughout this entire process that he has no remorse for the family. He hasn't provided any additional information about how this happened. It's been complete and total denial." Wednesday 4 January 2012 - The announcement of Waterhouse's death warrant was welcome news for Bruce Bartlett, Pinellas-Pasco chief assistant state attorney. Bartlett helped secure a second death sentence for Waterhouse after the Florida Supreme Court tossed his original death sentence. "He definitely ranks among some of the most notorious murderers that we had in Pinellas County during that time," Bartlett said. "I'm glad to see the governor moving forward with this." |
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The states’ attorneys say the move would rob them of an important bargaining chip — the threat of death to get guilty pleas from suspects who opt for life in prison. Take that off the table, they say, and there’ll be more trials because defendants facing only the prospect of life behind bars would be less inclined to deal. “When we go to battle in the most serious, heinous cases, we have to have every weapon available to us,” said Thomas Gibbons, the state’s attorney in southwestern Illinois’ Madison County. “Let’s say you’re playing cards and you lose your ace — you’re one step behind.”
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On seeking the death penalty for the murderers of Channon Christian and Christopher Newsom “These weren't just murders," prosecutor Leland Price said. "These crimes cry out for the maximum penalty. Give us justice."
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"I can still see the picture of that little girl in the field," said Catherine Babbitt, chief of the Bexar County district attorney's family justice division, who helped prosecute the case. "Murder is horrible anytime. Not only did we have a murder of a child, but a murder and a rape of a child. It was particularly horrific." [Referring to the execution of Guadalupe Esparza on 16 November 2011] |
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Marion County District Attorney
Walt Beglau,
whose office prosecuted Haugen and a co-defendant in the 2003 killing of inmate
David Polin at the Oregon State Penitentiary, said counties with prison
populations see the death penalty as a valuable deterrent in preventing crime
within the prison walls.
"Someone doing a life sentence or the equivalent really isn't threatened by (another) life sentence" as punishment for a prison murder, he said. |
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Tuesday 8 March 2011: In the words of Kane, when asked by state Rep. Gary A. Holder-Winfield, D-New Haven, what he considered the value of the death penalty, "There are crimes … which are so horrendous that the public has the right to have us as prosecutors seek the highest penalty that the law permits. "I think, with regard to human beings being on the face of the earth, there was a substantial amount of our life over the years where a death penalty was probably necessary for the survival of civilization," Kane added. |
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