Albert Camus (1957):
An execution is not simply death. It is just as different from the privation of life as a concentration camp is from prison. It adds to death a rule, a public premeditation known to the future victim, an organization which is itself a source of moral sufferings more terrible than death. Capital punishment is the most premeditated of murders, to which no criminal's deed, however calculated can be compared. For there to be an equivalency, the death penalty would have to punish a criminal who had warned his victim of the date at which he would inflict a horrible death on him and who, from that moment onward, had confined him at his mercy for months. Such a monster is not encountered in private life.

George Bernard Shaw:
It is the deed that teaches, not the name we give it. Murder and capital punishment are not opposites that cancel one another, but similars that breed their kind.

Former US Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun:
From this day forward, I no longer shall tinker with the machinery of death. . . . I feel morally and intellectually obligated simply to concede that the death penalty experiment has failed. It is virtually self-evident to me now that no combination of procedural rules or substantive regulations ever can save the death penalty from its inherent constitutional deficiencies.

Marquis de Lafayette (1830):
Until the infallibility of human judgment shall have been proved to me, I shall persist in demanding the abolition of the death penalty

Richard Dieter:
The death penalty is parading through the streets of America as if it were clothed in the finest robes of criminal justice. Most politicians applaud its finery; others stare in silence, too timid to proclaim that the emperor has no clothes. Instead of confronting the twin crises of the economy and violence, politicians offer the death penalty as if it were a meaningful solution to crime. At the same time, more effective and vital services to the community are being sacrificed. Voters should be told the truth about the death penalty. They should understand that there are programs that do work in reducing crime, but the resources to pay for such programs are being diverted into show executions. Being sensible about crime is not being soft on crime. Too much is at stake to allow political manipulation to silence the truth about the death penalty in America.