Caryl Chessman Quotes

This interesting historical quotation illustrates the fact that in almost every American generation there are those who believe that society has gone too far in protecting the rights of criminal suspects at the expense of law and order in the general society. This is nothing new. This is a classic argument given by those who would deny a defendant the Constitutional protection against self-incrimination. The belief that an innocent man has nothing to fear from the police is refuted by the many cases of innocent men being convicted by evidence they have given in the belief that they were innocent, and served long jail sentences only to later be proved by DNA evidence that they could not possibly have been guilty. Since Nott’s day, society has not only found many cases where honest error was made by the police or prosecutors, but many where there was venal prosecutorial misconduct and defendants were jailed even though the authorities were aware of evidence of innocence and kept it secret. There have been a number of these cases where a defendant was on death row and about to be executed when it was found he was innocent. Probably there have been men wrongly executed. See {629444} for a probable example.

This is one of the many statements of President Bush that contributed to his reputation as a polarizing politician. His supporters turned to this statement to illustrate that Bush was a supporter of the Constitution and civil liberties by urging the nation not to engage in vigilantism or give vent to their stereotypic views of minorities. Detractors took the same statement as a perfect example of Bush’s assault on Constitutional freedoms. Law enforcement does not determine guilt or innocence in our system. Police and prosecutors in America do not determine guilt or innocence; juries do. They argue that the Bush administration law enforcement policies are designed to have law enforcement usurp more and more of this facet of criminal justice.

This sura is the origin of the requirement in some Islamic states that there be four witnesses in order to convict a man of rape. Under Sharia, it is virtually impossible to convict a man of rape unless he commits the crime in public or with a group of others. In Paksitan, for example, one-on-one rape is virtually never prosecuted.

Under Iran’s interpretation of Islamic law, dogs were “unclean” and thus forbidden as pets. In 2001, Iran had a crackdown on pet owners throughout the country.

He was then the Home Secretary and his guidance and restraint was to avoid overreaction. The magistrates however did not act with great restraint over a series of demonstrations which culminated in 11 deaths in The Peterloo Massacre,

In the quoted passage, it describes Diogenes as observing a thief being arrested in one of the religious temples by the officials of the temple. He had pilfered one of the temple treasures. Not unlike modern times, most religious organizations raised money be getting donations from the public. Some of the means of many of the religious groups are and have been of dubious morality and if used in commerce would generally be considered fraud. This quotation shows that this is not a new phenomenon nor was it limited to monotheistic religions.

CREEP in the Nixon Campaign. He was himself a convicted Watergate conspirator

The Argentine Military kidnapped, tortured and murdered tens of thousands of Argentine citizens after they had seized power. When they were finally tried, like the Nuremberg Trials of the Nazis, the crimes were so terrible that specific existing laws were not sufficient to describe the crimes exactly. The conviction of the Argentine criminals, like the Nazis, broke new ground in international law.

Several years before the Battle of Bunker Hill, revolutionary activity had already broken out in the American colonies—See {634132} for an example. Parliament passed the Administration of Justice Act of 1774 which gave the British authorities much more “clout” in dealing with the “seditious” American activities. It protected English law enforcement officials from being tried in local Colonial courts for murder or assault or unnecessary force in putting down insurrections in the colonies. Washington and other patriots used this term to describe the Act. Their reason was that under the new law, a British Soldier could kill a colonist and would not be subject to arrest and trial in local colonial courts. So there was no check on the law enforcement authorities use of unnecessary or arbitrary force. English troops could commit murder and never be accountable to the people—hence the name. Ironically, in America today, most of the Federal and state laws on the subject tend to give law enforcement officials the same kind of immunity and impunity which the Founding Fathers found so objectionable. Civilian review boards of police use of force are no allowed in many American communities.