Josiah Sutton Quotes
Going to prison, for me, was like seeing my death before it happened.
It is unfortunately too common that people have been convicted and jailed because of misconduct of the police or prosecutors. Most criminal justice agencies in recent years have examined their methods and procedures and reforms are in progress. But there is still a human problem. For an example see Quote
Quoted in Matthew Shaer, "A Reasonable Doubt", The Atlantic, June 2016
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
This was an unusual public chastisement of federal prosecutors by a Senior Federal Judge in a criminal trial. Federal prosecutors meet very high standards to be appointed, but the position of prosecutor has often been a stepping stone to advancement in politics, and sometime the desire to win at almost any cost impinges on the fairness and justice of a case. Of interest in this quote also is the fact that the Judge urged his colleagues to do more publicly to deter these practices.
Mistakes in the criminal justice system have been with us from the birth of the nation.
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.
“Patriot” meant someone who was a supporter of anti-monarchy dissidents and rebels. It was more than a good citizen. The prisoners were incarcerated because they had been accused of supporting the monarchy early in or after the French Revolution.
The sheriff not only operated chain gangs in the 1990's but also had female prisoners chained together doing road work.
This quotation is often incorrectly ascribed to Joseph Stalin whose approach to dissidents comported with Monteverde.
As a Federal Judge, she was obligated to sentence people guilty of certain crimes to a minimum sentence prescribed by law and a sentencing commission.
- Born:
- Nationality: American
- Profession: Convict Wrongfully Convicted, Jailed & Exonerated
Born in 1982 In 2004, Josiah Sutton was exonerated after serving four and a half years of a 25 year sentence for a rape he did not commit. Sutton's conviction was the result of a mistaken identification and faulty scientific testing performed by the Houston police laboratory. He was proven innocence as a result of the work of the Innocence Project.
