Texas Gov. Rick Perry:
In Texas for a substantially long period of time, our citizens have decided that if you kill our children, if you kill our police officers, for those very heinous crimes, that the appropriate punishment is the death penalty. … I’m confident that the way that the executions are taken care of in the state of Texas are appropriate.
New York Times reporters Manny Fernandez and John Schwartz:
Some of those who condemn the state grudgingly agree that it kills with efficiency — from initial slumber into cessation of breathing — even though a prisoner who died of lethal injection in April was reported to have said, “It does kind of burn.”