These are some of the quotations that I have found useful in my project. Hopefully, they can be of some good use to you too. Most of these are form Sr. Helen Prejean's book Dead Man Walking. If you are doing a report on this subject READ IT!!!!

  To assert, in any case, that a man must be absolutely cut off from society because he is absolutely evil amounts to saying that society is absolutely good, and no one in his right mind would believe this today.

  The application of the death penalty is like a lottery because such a small percentage of murderers get the death penalty- 1 or 2 percent of the thousands who commit homicide every year. And of those receiving death sentences, only a fraction are executed. Most people think this one or two percent who go to death row must have committed the most heinous, pre meditated, cold-blooded murders, but you see in many, many of these cases panic murders by defendants who have a history of child abuse or have had head injuries or who are mentally retarded, or outright insane.

  If violence is objectivated institutionally as an expression of a society's collective political will to justice, institutions of violence will necessarily become formative of society. The more profoundly a society comes to rely on institutionalized violence as an instrument of its political purpose, the more tightly will institutionalized violence entangle society and the more formative of societal identity violence will become.

  I tell myself that I had simply better accept the fact that the death penalty is here to stay in our society, at least for a while, and there is nothing I can do about it. Maybe, in time- after how many executions? - people will come to realize the futility of randomly selecting a few people to die each year.

  In the example given (patently patriarchal: the woman is considered the negotiable property of her male master), it is clear that punishment is to be measured out according to the seriousness of the offense. If the child is lost but not the mother, the punishment is less grave than if both mother and child are lost. Only and eye for an eye, only a life for a life is the intent of this passage. Restraint was badly needed. It was not uncommon for an offended family or clan to slaughter entire communities in retaliation for an offense against one of their members.

  Money and influence decide who is considered for a parole hearing, what the decision is likely to be and what the Governor's decision is likely to be. It is that, not your behavior in prison that decides your release.

  People say that executing criminals does not take away from their dignity-- if it is done with dignity. But the fact of the matter is that whether you're waiting to die by lethal injection-- waiting to for the poison to flow down your veins--or waiting for a bullet, or waiting for a rope, or waiting for gas, or waiting for the electric current--there is no difference: there is no lesser or greater dignity in dying. The practice of the death penalty is the practice of torture. And by the time people I have been with finally climb into the chair to be killed, they have died a thousand times already because of their anticipation of the final horror.

  Forgiving violence does not mean condoning violence. There are only two alternatives to forgiving violence: revenge, or adopting an attitude of never-ending bitterness and anger. For too long we have treated violence with violence, and that's why it never ends.

  We ourselves must no presume to shorten the life of any human being. That would be no less than a crime against God. If we believe that death is the last enemy, then we shall not offer him our hand to serve him by killing men.

  The profound moral question is not, "Do they deserve to die?" but "Do we deserve to kill them?"

  Many that live deserve death. And some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them? Then do not be too eager to deal out death in judgement. For even the very wise cannot see all ends.

 It should be clear that the death penalty does just the opposite of promoting decency and respect for life. It dehumanizes people and promotes murder. It can never be applied fairly.