"Death penalty" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... November 1913, the leading spirits in the organisation being Captain White, D.S.O., and Sir Roger Casement, a Northern Protestant who, knighted by England for his consular and diplomatic services, was later to meet the death penalty at her hands for his loyalty to his own country. The new body drew its supporters from Parliamentarians, Sinn Feiners, Republicans and every other class of Irish Nationalist. The manifesto it issued ...
— Ireland Since Parnell • Daniel Desmond Sheehan
... sharp-shooter." The Lieutenant in command, being somewhat puzzled, brought him to me, and I had to explain that if the offence, disobedience of orders in face of the enemy, was repeated he might incur the death penalty; whereat he looked very crestfallen. That afternoon he got permission, like Fred Herrig, to go after guinea-hens, which were found wild in some numbers round about; and he sent me the only one he got as a peace offering. ...
— Rough Riders • Theodore Roosevelt
... fifteen thousand dollars,[24] was all recovered, and the murderers taken to St. Louis, where some were hung and some imprisoned, the doctor escaping the death penalty by turning state's evidence. His sentence was incarceration in the penitentiary, from which he was pardoned after remaining there two years. Hobbs met the doctor some years after in San Francisco. He was then leading an honest life, publishing a newspaper, and ...
— The Old Santa Fe Trail - The Story of a Great Highway • Henry Inman
... a year later it was learned that all five were innocent. Sometimes "race prejudice" is given as the reason why certain Negroes were lynched. That probably means that in no such instance had the lynched Negro committed any offence, or at most none deserving the death penalty ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 6, 1921 • Various
... 10: The Old Law inflicted the death penalty for the more grievous crimes, viz. for those which are committed against God, and for murder, for stealing a man, irreverence towards one's parents, adultery and incest. In the case of thief of other ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I-II (Pars Prima Secundae) - From the Complete American Edition • Saint Thomas Aquinas
... commit an indecent assault on them, and when they come out of the anesthetic they may be so sure of the reality of their dream that they will bring a complaint against the doctor. Many men have suffered disgrace and imprisonment and have had their lives ruined or even paid the death penalty on account of false accusations against them by either pervert, hysterical, ...
— Woman - Her Sex and Love Life • William J. Robinson
... and for a third offence his tongue was to be bored with a hot iron. At length in 1658, the Federal Commissioners, sitting at Boston with Endicott as chairman, recommended capital punishment. It must be borne in mind that the general reluctance toward prescribing or inflicting the death penalty was much weaker then than now. On the statute-books there were not less than fifteen capital crimes, including such offences as idolatry, witchcraft, blasphemy, marriage within the Levitical degrees, "presumptuous ...
— The Beginnings of New England - Or the Puritan Theocracy in its Relations to Civil and Religious Liberty • John Fiske
... acquitted, but they were arrested at once for the robbery of the Bristol mail and committed to Newgate. On trial they were found guilty, and paid the penalty of death by hanging at Tyburn, on the 3rd September, 1782. In later years the death penalty for robbing mails was abolished, and at least one old sinner who robbed the Bristol mail eventually did remarkably well through having committed that dire offence against the laws, and by having been transported to the Antipodes at ...
— The King's Post • R. C. Tombs
... that they have only been sentenced to terms of imprisonment, while some of their accomplices have been condemned to death, has a much simpler explanation. Both men are under the age of twenty, and therefore by Austrian law immune from the death penalty.] ...
— The War and Democracy • R.W. Seton-Watson, J. Dover Wilson, Alfred E. Zimmern,
... The Attitude of St. Augustine towards the Manicheans St. Augustine and Donatism The Church and the Priscillianists The Early Fathers and the Death Penalty ...
— The Inquisition - A Critical and Historical Study of the Coercive Power of the Church • E. Vacandard
... by the Coalition Leaders caused no little misgiving at the time, and pledges, like curses, have an awkward way of coming home to roost. Mr. Punch's views on the Kaiser, expressed in his Christmas Epilogue, are worth recalling. Mr. Punch did not clamour for the death penalty, or wish to hand him over to the tender mercies of German Kultur. "The only fault he committed in German eyes is that he lost the War, and I wouldn't have him punished for the wrong offence—for something, ...
— Mr. Punch's History of the Great War • Punch
... flagellation," as Collas states in his great work on this subject, "is the history of a moral bankruptcy."[5] The survival of barbarous punishments from barbarous days, when ferocious punishments were a matter of course and the death penalty was inflicted for horse-stealing without in the least diminishing that offence, may be intelligible. But the re-enactment of such measures in so-called civilised days is an everlasting discredit to those who advocate it, and a disgrace to the community which ...
— Essays in War-Time - Further Studies In The Task Of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... vast juggernaut chariot, which, however, they had arrested, but hoped to expiate past errors by future zeal. At the same time they urged that it was not they who had demoralized the army or abolished the death penalty or thrown open the sluice-gates to anarchist floods. On the contrary, they claimed to have reorganized the national forces, reintroduced the severest discipline ever known, appointed experienced officers, and restored capital punishment. ...
— The Inside Story Of The Peace Conference • Emile Joseph Dillon
... verge of insurrection. Nor did the executions achieve the desired end. The last sentence was never carried into effect, and for years the Quakers continued to molest the colony, pushing their extravagances sometimes to the farthest limit. To fall to mere flogging after having inflicted the death penalty was a fatal anti-climax which marks a turning-point in Massachusetts history—the beginning of the end of ...
— Beginnings of the American People • Carl Lotus Becker
... humane and full of feeling. It is only despots hold the death penalty to be a necessary attribute of authority. The sovereign people will do away with it one day. Robespierre fought against it, and all good patriots were with him; the law abolishing it cannot be too soon promulgated. But it will not have to be applied till the last ...
— The Gods are Athirst • Anatole France
... Committee have assembled for deliberation, the decision of the majority upon any question that may be submitted to them by the Executive Committee shall be binding upon the whole; provided nevertheless, no vote inflicting the death penalty, shall be binding unless passed by two thirds of those present and entitled ...
— A Sketch of the Causes, Operations and Results of the San Francisco Vigilance Committee of 1856 • Stephen Palfrey Webb
... remain a couple of days, and during that time had a stormy interview with Zebehr, who accused him of the murder of his son. Gordon's reply was practically that had full justice been done, Zebehr too would have paid the death penalty. Though he had such a short time at Cairo, he found opportunity to interest himself in the affairs of a poor lad, the son of a native pastor of the Church Missionary Society at Jaffa. The boy had been in ...
— General Gordon - A Christian Hero • Seton Churchill
... were seven hundred bodies of the slain which the villagers had to bury. He does not say if any of the wounded recovered. In the time of Henry III, of England, a law was made which prescribed the death penalty for "Kyllynge, wowndynge, or mamynge" a fairy, and it was ...
— The Devil's Dictionary • Ambrose Bierce
... for fraudulent sale of drink, for disorderly conduct of tavern, for delegation of personal service, for misappropriating the levy, for oppression of feudal holders, for causing death of a householder by bad building. The manner of death is not specified in these cases. This death penalty was also fixed for such conduct as placed another in danger of death. A specified form of death penalty occurs in the following cases: gibbeting (on the spot where crime was committed) for burglary, later also for encroaching on the king's highway, for getting a slave-brand ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 1 - "Austria, Lower" to "Bacon" • Various
... forgotten now, Alphonse Karr, said somewhere, trying to show the impossibility of doing away with the death penalty: "Que messieurs les assassins commencent par nous donner l'exemple." Often have I heard this BON MOT repeated by men who thought that these words were a witty and convincing argument against the abolition of capital punishment. And yet all the erroneousness ...
— The Kingdom of God is within you • Leo Tolstoy
... from the English that this special death penalty originated. It had been for hundreds of years the recognized punishment for mutiny and rebellion throughout Hindostan, and in numberless cases was carried out by ...
— A Narrative Of The Siege Of Delhi - With An Account Of The Mutiny At Ferozepore In 1857 • Charles John Griffiths
... the Russian code of laws the death penalty, and substituted, in its stead, heavy fines. The Russian historians, however, record that it is impossible to decide whether this measure was the dictate of humanity, or if he wished in this way to ...
— The Empire of Russia • John S. C. Abbott
... Death penalty, inflicted for— witchcraft, 1. threatening witnesses, 3. perjury, 3. theft, 4. receiving stolen goods, 4. buying from domestic inferior, 7. taking on deposit from domestic inferior, 7. in default of multiple restitution, for theft of second order, 8. appropriation ...
— The Oldest Code of Laws in the World - The code of laws promulgated by Hammurabi, King of Babylon - B.C. 2285-2242 • Hammurabi, King of Babylon
... will not work with our Committees, they betray us to the enemy, they apply the death penalty to our agitators; and the counter-revolutionary Government supports them. We thought that the Revolution would bring peace. But now the Government forbids us even to talk of such things, and at the same time doesn't ...
— Ten Days That Shook the World • John Reed
... three. On the first vote as to the king's guilt there was no contrary voice. Some tell only of this. The vote on the penalty was given individually, with reasons, and a majority of 145 declared for the death penalty, at once or after peace was made with Austria, or after confirmation by the people. The votes for immediate death were only 361 as against 360. History abounds with similar illustrations. As an example of another ...
— The Great Doctrines of the Bible • Rev. William Evans
... violence and insinuating into my mind a doubt, which has gone on increasing. A painful struggle has been going on in my mind, a cruel struggle—and if, as I was finishing, I labored under that emotion of which the President was speaking, if when I demanded the death penalty my voice was scarcely audible, it was because I was at the end of my struggle; because my conscience was on the point of winning the battle, and I made haste to finish, because I was afraid it would speak out against my will. When I saw the advocate remain seated and ...
— Woman on Her Own, False Gods & The Red Robe - Three Plays By Brieux • Eugene Brieux
... death penalty for adultery seems, however, to have ceased before the days of Sewall's Diary: for, though he often mentions the crime, he makes no mention of such a punishment. The custom of execution for far less heinous offences was prevalent in the seventeenth century, as any ...
— Woman's Life in Colonial Days • Carl Holliday
... bail, and the rest were merely acquitted or imprisoned. On the whole the American revolutionists were not bloody-minded men; they inaugurated no September Massacres, no Reign of Terror, no dragonnades. There was a distinct aversion among them to applying the death penalty. 'We shall have many unhappy persons to take their trials for their life next Oyer court,' wrote a North Carolina patriot. 'Law should be strictly adhered to, severity exercised, but the doors of mercy should never ...
— The United Empire Loyalists - A Chronicle of the Great Migration - Volume 13 (of 32) in the series Chronicles of Canada • W. Stewart Wallace
... archives, to which every king may add what commands he lists, and Wahl inscribed many laws and decrees of import favorable to Jews. My father knew some of them; one was that the murderer of a Jew, like the murderer of a nobleman, was to suffer the death penalty. Life was to be taken for life, and no ransom allowed—a law which, in Poland, had applied only to the case of Christians of the nobility. The next day the electors came to an agreement, and chose a ruler for Poland.—That this matter ...
— Jewish Literature and Other Essays • Gustav Karpeles
... been the glory of the greatest men of antiquity. Philanthropy, in spite of the ridicule which sometimes attaches to its name, will remain, in the eyes of posterity, the most honorable characteristic of our time: the abolition of the death penalty, which is merely postponed; the abolition of the stigma; the studies regarding the effects of the cellular system; the establishment of workshops in the prisons; and a multitude of other reforms which I cannot even name,—give evidence of real progress in our ideas and in our morals. What the author ...
— The Philosophy of Misery • Joseph-Pierre Proudhon
... his own hands the gaikwar had beaten one of his own servants to death. Two Hindu judges of the court voted for acquittal, but the remainder found him guilty. As the judgment was not unanimous, Mahal Rao escaped the death penalty which he deserved, and would have suffered but for the sympathy of his judicial co-religionists. He was deposed and sent to prison, and when an investigation of his finances was made, it was found that during the last year of his reign he had wasted $3,500,000 in gifts ...
— Modern India • William Eleroy Curtis
... said Hanky severely, "that he should be brought up for poaching. He is a foreign devil, and as such your son is bound to fling him without trial into the Blue Pool. Why bring a smaller charge when you must inflict the death penalty on a more serious one? I have already told you that I shall feel it my duty to report the matter at headquarters, unless I am satisfied that the death penalty ...
— Erewhon Revisited • Samuel Butler
... that police officers acquire in good faith. These proposals would also reform the habeas corpus laws and allow, in keeping with the will of the overwhelming majority of Americans, the use of the death penalty where necessary. ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... it was once the custom in England to conduct executions in public. Lombroso records it as being his conviction that such publicity does, by the law of imitation, lead more into crime than it turns from it. This he considers is one of the most powerful arguments in favour of abolishing the death penalty. Out of 167 persons condemned to death in England, 164 had been present at executions. The reading of sensational novels or the descriptive accounts of great crimes has a most alarming effect upon those who are of an impressionable nature. These persons are to themselves ...
— A Plea for the Criminal • James Leslie Allan Kayll
... in the state might aspire to this dignity, provided he had Negro blood in his veins. There were other officials, both of a military and of a civil character. In the interests of good order, the Zombes made laws imposing the death penalty for murder, adultery, and robbery. Slavery existed, and in this respect there was a curious custom. Every Negro who had won his freedom from the white man, by whatever method, as for example by a successful flight to Palmares, ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 3, 1918 • Various
... Marillac, without stopping at this interruption, "that I should improvise a discourse upon the death penalty or upon temperance? Would you like me to tell you ...
— Gerfaut, Complete • Charles de Bernard
... who had been foisted upon the republicans was drugged and died, and Dessault, his medical attendant, died also—the suspicion being that both were poisoned. This miserable child, who had thus paid the death penalty for his king was none other, the pretender said, than the son of a rascally tailor, named Hervagault, ...
— Celebrated Claimants from Perkin Warbeck to Arthur Orton • Anonymous
... dwell upon that phase of it, it staggered her—where those code messages came from, and how; why Rough Rorke of headquarters had never made a sign since that first night; why the original Gypsy Nan, who was dead now, had been forced into hiding with the death penalty of the law hanging over her; why Danglar, though Gypsy Nan's husband, was comparatively free. These, and a myriad other things! But she counted now upon her knowledge of the Adventurer's secret to force ...
— The White Moll • Frank L. Packard
... the half-breed who was charged with killing Zoe. The state's attorney had the half-breed's confession. Though he was half insane from drink when he did the deed, the prosecutor intended to ask for the death penalty. ...
— Children of the Market Place • Edgar Lee Masters
... The death penalty in Brazil is generally commuted except in the case of negroes, but this time it was to be suffered ...
— Eight Hundred Leagues on the Amazon • Jules Verne
... had incurred a death penalty and were about to be publicly executed, they referred not to Christ for comfort, but counseled patience in their own well-deserved suffering and death; as if God would accept their pain as atonement for their sins ...
— Epistle Sermons, Vol. II - Epiphany, Easter and Pentecost • Martin Luther
... to oppose, then to admit the principle of the reform, and finally to enact it into enduring law. On his initiative, in 1823, "nearly one hundred felonies were removed from the list of capital crimes, and judges were empowered to withhold the death penalty in all cases except murder, when the culprit appeared deserving of mercy." Other acts originating with him consolidated and unified the vast and complex body of criminal statutes so as to simplify procedure, and facilitate the ends of justice. Some conception of his services in this ...
— Ten Englishmen of the Nineteenth Century • James Richard Joy
... officials to see that the laws were put into execution, but at the same time he took care to let it be known that the extraction of fines from the wealthy laymen and the imprisonment or transportation of priests would be more agreeable to him than the infliction of the death penalty. Louis XIII. and the Pope protested warmly against this breach of a solemn agreement. Charles replied that he had bound himself not to enforce the penal laws merely as a means of lulling the suspicions ...
— History of the Catholic Church from the Renaissance • Rev. James MacCaffrey
... for its execution. This culpable negligence did not please Parliament, and, just before his fall, another Act was passed for the more effective enforcement of the Six Articles. One relaxation was found necessary; it was impossible to inflict the death penalty on "incontinent"[1110] priests, because there were so many. But that was the only indulgence granted. Two days after Cromwell's death, a vivid illustration was given of the spirit which was henceforth to dominate the Government. Six men were ...
— Henry VIII. • A. F. Pollard
... carry her away perforce, as he had perhaps treated earlier sweethearts, Fonteia scoffed at the suggestion. The Atrium Vestae was in the heart of the city; there was a constant patrol on duty. For a man to enter the Building at night meant the death penalty. Whosoever did violence to a Vestal fell under a religious curse; he was a homo sacer, a "sacred man," a victim devoted to the gods, whom it was a pious deed to slay. And thus comforted, with the assurance that the whole power of the Republic would rise for her personal defence, ...
— A Friend of Caesar - A Tale of the Fall of the Roman Republic. Time, 50-47 B.C. • William Stearns Davis
... the penalty inflamed men's minds to the commission of wrong. On the contrary, the birth of lenience and humanity was immediately rewarded by a decline of crime. These are lessons which we do well to recollect to-day when statesmen advocate the death penalty for the anarchist, irrespective of his exact crime; when city councils propose the same penalty for those guilty of outrages on women; when indignant mobs, in spite of law, and without trial, burn at the stake offending negroes. If history teaches anything with an emphasis at once clear ...
— The Empire of Love • W. J. Dawson
... and loss of life that ensue. It would sometimes pay us to give these agents more and more rope, keeping them under observation until we can strike at the centre and heart of all this plotting. When we have enough evidence against one of these agents for a death penalty we should allow him to purchase his life by betraying his master, and as these agents only serve for hire and know not what loyalty is, they are always ready to turn king's evidence if the price offered be high enough. Of course, they should not be given their liberty again, but segregated ...
— "Over There" with the Australians • R. Hugh Knyvett |
