Leonard Peltier Quotes

Judges... are picked out from the most dextrous lawyers, who are grown old or lazy, and having been biased all their lives against truth or equity, are under such a fatal necessity of favoring fraud, perjury and oppression, that I have known several of them to refuse a large bribe from the side where justice lay, rather than injure the faculty by doing any thing unbecoming their nature in office.

As, for the safety of society, we commit honest maniacs to Bedlam, so judges should be withdrawn from the bench, whose erroneous biases are leading us to dissolution.

Judges are objects of aversion and distrust.

With the present state of the Egyptian judiciary, they [the government] can convict anybody of anything.

People in the U.S. pay a great deal of money to support their judiciary, and they have an actual right to see how it functions.

As, for the safety of society, we commit honest maniacs to Bedlam, so judges should be withdrawn from their bench, whose erroneous biases are leading us to dissolution. It may indeed injure them in fame or in fortune; but it saves the republic, which is the first and supreme law.

I don't want to know what the law is, I want to know who the judge is.

Knowing that religion does not furnish grosser bigots than law, I expect little from old judges.

Courts in America seem to be so political, and it would be so great for our justice system if they would be able to read a statement and do what's right.

I have to say that the judges and our judiciary system makes better decisions than the politicians.

The FBI with their heavy influence on the judiciary system has successfully blocked me on every turn.

How long will it be before the cry goes up: "Let's kill all the judges"?

Probably the worst thing that has happened in America in my time is the decay of confidence in the courts. No one can be sure any more that in a given case they will uphold the plainest mandate of the Constitution. On the contrary, everyone begins to be more or less convinced in advance that they won't. Judges are chosen not because they know the Constitution and are in favor of it, but precisely because they appear to be against it.

Am I right in saying that the locust of this problem is simply that judges in America are half political animals and half oracular demigods?

The judiciary has fallen to a very low state in this country. I think your part of the country has suffered especially. The federal judges of the South are a disgrace to any country, and I'll be damned if I put any man on the bench of whose character and ability there is the least doubt.

In lieu of those checks and balances central to our legal system, non-citizens face an executive that is now investigator, prosecutor, judge, jury and jailer or executioner. In an Orwellian twist, Bush's order calls this Soviet-style abomination 'a full and fair trial.'

There was a vacuum in investigation, and the press began to try men in the most effective court in the country.

Today government touches everything in America and harms almost everything it touches. Federal, state, and local governments together spend 42 out of every 100 dollars we earn. Those who do the taxing and spending have long since ceased to work for the people as a whole. Rather, they work for themselves and for their clients-the education industry, the welfare culture, public-employee unions, etc.

Justice is a machine that, when some one has once given it the starting push, rolls on of itself.

The notion that most people want black-robed judges, well-dressed lawyers and fine-paneled courtrooms as the setting to resolve their disputes is not correct. People with problems, like people with pains, want relief, and they want it as quickly and inexpensively as possible.

It could well be the end of justice in America. Do not let Mr. Reagan get his hands on that court.

I want a Supreme Court that doesn't always side with corporate interests.

The newspaper that obstructs the law on a trivial pretext, for money's sake, is a dangerous enemy to the public weal. That awful power, the public opinion of a nation, is created in America by a horde of ignorant, self-complacent simpletons who failed at ditching and shoemaking and fetched up in journalism on their way to the poorhouse.

Justice is not to be taken by storm. She is to be wooed by slow advances. Substitute statute for decision, and you shift the center of authority, but add no quota of inspired wisdom.

If the question [before justices of the peace] relate to any point of public liberty, or if it be one of those in which the judges may be suspected of bias, the jury undertake to decide both law and fact.