"The ability of so many people to live comfortably with the idea of capital punishment is perhaps a clue to how so many Europeans were able to live with the idea of the Holocaust: Once you accept the notion that the state has the right to kill someone and the right to define what is a capital crime, aren't you halfway there?"

"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."

"To the left of the stairway was an opaque glass door with a sign that read: SOCIETY FOR THE ABOLISHMENT OF CAPITAL PUNISHMENT. The door was locked but the next morning, I knew, the stiff-looking lady with the bleached blond hair would be back at her typewriter. What did one do to abolish capital punishment? I wondered. I had asked Father one day what capital punishment meant. "Killing," said Father, "but they are wasting their time." How strange, I had thought, to waste one's time sitting at a typewriter all day long to abolish something that was already against the law."

"Yeah, modern life may be monotonous with its 9-5 work week and overcrowded morning commutes; but you should be thankful you only have to suffer this and not some of the most brutal execution techniques in history. Fire up Wikipedia or any website on historical capital punishment and you'll swiftly learn that humanity has been responsible for some of the most depraved ways of torturing and killing each other over the years."

"Capital punishment kills immediately, whereas lifetime imprisonment does so slowly. Which executioner is more humane? The one who kills you in a few minutes, or the one who wrests your life from you in the course of many years?"

"The traditional teaching of the Church does not exclude, presupposing full ascertainment of the identity and responsibility of the offender, recourse to the death penalty, when this is the only practicable way to defend the lives of human beings effectively against the aggressor. "If, instead, bloodless means are sufficient to defend against the aggressor and to protect the safety of persons, public authority should limit itself to such means, because they better correspond to the concrete conditions of the common good and are more in conformity to the dignity of the human person. "Today, in fact, given the means at the State's disposal to effectively repress crime by rendering inoffensive the one who has committed it, without depriving him definitively of the possibility of redeeming himself, cases of absolute necessity for suppression of the offender 'today ... are very rare, if not practically non-existent.' John Paul II, Evangelium vitae 56.]"