…we as the Church need to express wherever appropriate and wherever possible our stance against the death penalty. We need to talk about it. A lot of people don’t feel comfortable in doing this but I think we need to, as the Pope says, preach the whole gospel of life.

Bishop Gabino Zavala, San Gabriel Region of the Archdiocese of Los Angeles

There may be times when we are powerless to prevent injustice, but there must never be a time when we fail to protest.

Elie Wiesel, 1986 Nobel Peace Loureate and Holocaust Survivor

The ultimate measure of a person is not where one stand in moments of comfort and convenience, but where one stands at times of challenge and controversy. - Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

If people are genuinely concerned with the victims’ family’s plight, there should instead be a clamor for the legal and social measures which will provide the real support systems these families need in their times of anguish and irrevocable loss – financial assistance, therapeutic counsel, trial information, resolution, etc.

Marietta Jaeger-Lane, cofounder of the Journey of Hope … From Violence for Healing

I am determined not to kill, not to let others kill, and not to condone any act of killing in the world, in my thinking, and in my way of life. We cannot support any act of killing; no killing can be justified. But not to kill is not enough … If in your thinking you allow the killing to go on, you also break this precept. We must be determined not to condone killing, even in our minds. -

Venerable Thich Nhat Hanh, Zen Buddhist monk, peace activist, scholar, and poet

Criminals, people who commit crimes, usually society rejects these people. They are also part of society. Give them some form of punishment to say they were wrong, but show them they are part of society and can change. Show them compassion.

Dalai Lama.

The calculated killing of a human being by the state involves, by its very nature, an absolute denial of the executed person’s humanity. The most vile murder does not, in my view, release the state from constitutional restraint on the destruction of human dignity.

U.S. Supreme Court Justice William Brennan

Standing alone among great democratic nations in imposing the death penalty is another moral decision that Americans are being forced to confront. 

President Jimmy Carter

In all religions, we make a choice about what we emphasize, and I choose to come down on the side of a loving God. - Reverend Bernice King No man has the right to take God’s place and say another man should die. It destroyed my life.

Perry Cobb, who spent 8 years on death row in Illinois for a crime he did not commit. He was exonerated in 1987.

Unless we live with nonviolence and reverence for all living beings in our hearts, all our humaneness and acts of goodness, all our vows, virtues, and knowledge, all our practices to give up greed and acquisitiveness are meaningless … Indeed, the pain of others is our own, for the consequences of neglect and apathy cannot be long in coming our way.

Mahavira, founder of Jainism