"The chief and worst pain may not be in the bodily suffering but in one's knowing for certain that in an hour, and then in ten minutes, and then in half a minute, and then now, at the very moment, the soul will leave the body and that one will cease to be a man and that that's bound to happen; the worst part of it is that it's certain. When you lay your head down under the knife and hear the knife slide over your head, that quarter of a second is the most terrible of all. You know this is not only my imagination, many people have said the same. I believe that so thoroughly that I'll tell you what I think To kill for murder is a punishment incomparably worse than the crime itself. Murder by legal sentence is immeasurably more terrible than murder by brigands."
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Original Language: English
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Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Idiot, Ch. 2, Prince Myshkin.
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Capital_punishment
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Capital punishment
Capital punishment, also known as the death penalty, is the execution of a convicted criminal by the state as punishment for crimes known as capital crimes or capital offences. At various times, the execution of criminals and political opponents was used by nearly all societies both to punish crime and to suppress political dissent.
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