"Death penalty" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... greeted with general disapproval. It was held that had the prince been captured on French territory, he could have been tried under a law which in this case carried the death penalty, but that to go and seize him beyond the frontiers, in a foreign land, was a gross ...
— The Memoirs of General the Baron de Marbot, Translated by - Oliver C. Colt • Baron de Marbot
... nearer my idea of real story-writing." Before starting to write the present story, he outlined briefly how he intended to develop it: Murray, the criminal accused and convicted of the brutal murder of his sweetheart—a murder prompted by jealous rage—at first faces the death penalty, calm, and, to all outward appearances, indifferent to his fate. As he nears the electric chair he is overcome by a revulsion of feeling. He is left dazed, stupefied, stunned. The entire scene in the death-chamber—the witnesses, ...
— Rolling Stones • O. Henry
... The common assumption that every bird or mammal that offends, or injures the property of any man, is necessarily deserving of death, is absurd and intolerable. The death penalty should be the last resort, not the ...
— The Minds and Manners of Wild Animals • William T. Hornaday
... the death penalty did so in expiation for lives they had taken. The names of these culprits are familiar to the reader. We also give the names of those who were required to leave the State; all of whom, in the archives of the Vigilantes, fall under the head of the ...
— California 1849-1913 - or the Rambling Sketches and Experiences of Sixty-four - Years' Residence in that State. • L. H. Woolley
... Slav, and was abhorrent to his instincts. This seems a strange statement to make regarding the land of the knout! But it is true. And imprisonment, convict labor, flogging, torture, mutilation, and even the death penalty, came into this land by the ...
— A Short History of Russia • Mary Platt Parmele
... discover that one of his servants had made off with his box of jewellery and his one and only cousaba. Then he swore as only a Mohammedan priest can, and rode after the thief. In three days he was back with the felon, whose death penalty he postponed for a time on condition that he carried the remaining pig into Sego. At Sannanba, Isaaco found again the sister and the wife he had left there five years before. He seems to have quite forgotten ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 7, 1922 • Various
... followed one another—fowl with gravy, lobsters, mushrooms, salads, roast larks—many topics were handled: the best system of taxation, the advantages of the large system of land cultivation, the abolition of the death penalty. The sub-prefect did not forget to cite that charming witticism of a clever man: "Let Messieurs the ...
— Bouvard and Pecuchet - A Tragi-comic Novel of Bourgeois Life • Gustave Flaubert
... 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 ...
— Modern India • William Eleroy Curtis
... only proper adequate punishment for his offenses; but Dale knew that, according to the tenets of all religions, God does not allow private individuals to mete out punishment, however well deserved—especially not the death penalty. ...
— The Devil's Garden • W. B. Maxwell
... 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, ...
— 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
... of inflicting the death penalty," the gaunt old man said, slipping into a heavy, quilted dressing-gown. "These rascals don't mind hanging or the penitentiary. But if they thought their bodies would be everlastingly destroyed by quicklime, they'd ...
— Jane Cable • George Barr McCutcheon
... city. b. To compel children to attend school. c. To buy uniforms for a regiment of soldiers. d. To establish a death penalty. e. To send a committee abroad to ...
— Civil Government in the United States Considered with - Some Reference to Its Origins • John Fiske
... that in France the death penalty was decreed against bankrupts without distinction. Simple failures involved no penalty; fraudulent bankrupts suffered the penalty of death in the states of Orleans, under Charles IX., and in the states of Blois in 1576, but these edicts, renewed by Henry ...
— Voltaire's Philosophical Dictionary • Voltaire
... 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, revengeful ...
— Woman - Her Sex and Love Life • William J. Robinson
... Pardon these quotations and illustrations. They are my only means of at all adequately presenting to you a scientific man's conception of the meaning of the struggle for life. The laws of evolution are written in blood and bear the death penalty. For ...
— The Whence and the Whither of Man • John Mason Tyler
... from me, and I can't wear it again. I can never again serve my country. It was handled quietly, with admirable discretion, for those things are bad for the morale, you understand? Very few know about it. I'm a proud man, a vain man; I assure you the death penalty would have been much ...
— Flowing Gold • Rex Beach
... remains as the basis of the law administered among the Malays, notable improvements have been introduced, E.G. the death penalty for incest and corporal punishment for conjugal infidelity have been abolished; slaveholding, though not made illegal, has been discouraged throughout the country by rendering it easy for slaves to secure their freedom; ...
— The Pagan Tribes of Borneo • Charles Hose and William McDougall
... who, had he been beaten in December, could have escaped the death penalty only by the omnipotence of progress, and by an enlargement, too liberal certainly, of the principle that human life is sacred; this man, this Louis Bonaparte, this prince who carries the practices of Poulmann and Soufflard into politics, he it is who rebuilds the scaffold! ...
— Napoleon the Little • Victor Hugo
... killing a Negro, seared its conscience, lowered its estimate of the value of human life, and now, without due process of law, the white man who kills any one is almost uniformly exempt from the death penalty. The maltreatment of Negroes according to immutable laws precedes but by one day the ...
— The Hindered Hand - or, The Reign of the Repressionist • Sutton E. Griggs
... one-tenth this number, if we exclude those made so by the acts relating to military offenders in actual service, and felonies on the high seas, and a few others, which, like the latter, were created by including among capital crimes certain offences which, though theretofore exempt from the death penalty by special circumstances and technical rules, had always been capitally punished when committed under other and not less ...
— The Trial and Execution, for Petit Treason, of Mark and Phillis, Slaves of Capt. John Codman • Abner Cheney Goodell, Jr.
... 1774 John Howard began his great work in prison reform; in 1772 pressing to death was abolished; in 1780 the ducking-stool was used for the last time; and soon thereafter the earlier laws relating to the death penalty were modified, and the slave trade abolished. Up to the middle of the eighteenth century as many as one hundred and sixty offenses were punishable ...
— THE HISTORY OF EDUCATION • ELLWOOD P. CUBBERLEY
... ascribed to the image are speaking and enforcing the worship of itself under the penalty of death; and this is the only enactment which the prophecy mentions as enforced under the death penalty. Just what will constitute this worship, it will perhaps be impossible to determine till the image itself shall have an existence. It will evidently be some act or acts by which men will be required to acknowledge the authority of that image and yield ...
— The United States in the Light of Prophecy • Uriah Smith
... Guinea "glory in their nudeness and consider clothing fit only for women." There are many places where the women alone were clothed, while in others the women alone were naked. Mtesa, the King of Uganda, who died in 1884, inflicted the death penalty on any man who dared to approach him without having every inch of his legs carefully covered; but the women who acted as his servants were ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... mortals who 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 ...
— Epistle Sermons, Vol. II - Epiphany, Easter and Pentecost • Martin Luther
... under an old statute which was enacted during the period of the Canadian Rebellion of 1837, which provided that subjects of a foreign state who entered Canada for the purpose of levying war rendered themselves liable, on conviction, to the death penalty. ...
— Troublous Times in Canada - A History of the Fenian Raids of 1866 and 1870 • John A. Macdonald
... asked that, pending negotiations, no force should be allowed to come within thirty miles of London, and that riot and tumult raised in the city during that period after proclamation made should be met with a death penalty; and the last that if parliament so willed no one who had ever taken up arms against it should be allowed within thirty miles of London without leave. Both the answers and proposals of the city committee were alike approved by the council, and a house-to-house visitation ...
— London and the Kingdom - Volume II • Reginald R. Sharpe
... was no madness in Jim, he admitted. Once when his importunities tried him Jim had shown him just one brief glimpse of the heart which no death penalty had the ...
— The One-Way Trail - A story of the cattle country • Ridgwell Cullum
... the grant of L3,000,000 to be expended by Commissioners in the work of repatriation and the supply of shelter, seed, stock, etc., to the returning burghers; and the reference of rebels to their own Colonial Courts for trial, with the proviso that the death penalty should not in any case ...
— The Life of King Edward VII - with a sketch of the career of King George V • J. Castell Hopkins
... three years ago,—how the murderer would not confess until he was brought out of prison to hear the bells tolling for his victim's funeral,—how thereupon he was sentenced, and—but I will not relate further. I have always considered the death penalty a matter of policy rather than principle; but the sight of that blood-stained platform, the blood-fed weeds around it, and the vision of the headsman, in his red mantle, looking down upon the bared neck stretched upon the block, gave me more horror of the custom than all the books and ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 118, August, 1867 • Various
... "The history of 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 permits ...
— Essays in War-Time - Further Studies In The Task Of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... 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 ...
— The Old Santa Fe Trail - The Story of a Great Highway • Henry Inman
... observing the Germans replied to our guns, and very nearly got Major MacDougall. Poor chap, he was subsequently assassinated by a German spy or sniper behind in billets. His clothing was stolen and worn by the assassin who was caught and suffered the death penalty. ...
— The Red Watch - With the First Canadian Division in Flanders • J. A. Currie
... which to put my affairs in order. Instead, I have labored unceasingly here in my laboratory, and my labors have borne fruit. I am the first man in Xollarian history to find a means of escaping the dread death penalty. ...
— Zehru of Xollar • Hal K. Wells
... of 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 ...
— The Empire of Love • W. J. Dawson |
