Wiley Blount Rutledge Jr. Quotes
Equality before the law in a true democracy is a matter of right. It cannot be a matter of charity or of favor or of grace or of discretion.
Rutledge, Wiley Blount, Jr. Quoted in Salt of the Earth, Conscience of the Court: The Story of Justice Wiley Rutledge, by John M. Ferren, University of North Carolina Press, 2004.
Prosecutors, even ones who are frequent lawbreakers themselves violating defendant's rights or illegally manipulating trials, are reluctant to be officially found to have done so. Many politicians start their political careers as prosecutors and then rise to higher office. If it is officially found that they had abused a defendant and violated the law, it can be detrimental to their careers. So in many states, they have placed barriers making it much harder for an improperly convicted person to even get a court hearing. The cost to society however is that they are never accountable, and people have been wrongly imprisoned and cannot even get a hearing to prove that they were the victims of official misconduct. The rationale for these rules that prevent victims from obtaining fairness and justice is finality—the concept that there should be some end to the process of appeals so justice can be said to have been done. It prevents a kind of closure for many of the victims of crimes and their families if the guilty perpetrator is constantly appealing or can do so.
This quotation is a more sophisticated statement of the Magna Carta clause {583716}. Note that English law allowed redress against all other people including religions officials and government temporal officers. And everyone was entitled to justice and access to the courts including outlaws or people who have been excommunicated. In many countries these people do not have the protection of the law. This tradition allows prisoners in jail to sue the jailers for example. And imagine a person who had been excommunicated as a heretic and yet allowed to live turning around and suing clerics who were persecuting him in an Islamic nation other than Turkey.
Sealed under duress and later repudiated by the King with Papal assistance.
One of the earliest codes of equality before the law for both rich and poor.
This quotation shows that “due process” was an important principle for the colonists long before the American Revolution and the Constitution and Bill of Rights. Rights. Connecticut and New York passed similar laws after Massachusetts.
