Tom Price Quotes

Our criminal justice system is fallible. We know it, even though we don't like to admit it. It is fallible despite the best efforts of most within it to do justice. And this fallibility is, at the end of the day, the most compelling, persuasive, and winning argument against a death penalty.

The criminal justice system, like any system designed by human beings, clearly has its flaws.

I don’t think its right to have a criminal justice system that puts innocent people to death.

Look, the justice system is made up of people. People have faults. It's not perfect.

Every time when there is an exoneration, and there have been hundreds of them, and somebody walks out of jail after years, people ask, “how could this happen?” …. State sanctioned killing is just wrong.

The innocent are frequently punished instead of the guilty

Society is now less convinced of the absolute accuracy of the criminal justice system.

It's dangerous to write people off just because they've been arrested.

The judge is found guilty when a criminal is acquitted.

There are reasons to doubt that our criminal justice system is fundamentally just.

The judge is condemned when the guilty is absolved.

We do have the best justice system in the world—in theory. The problem is that it is run by human beings. Human beings make mistakes

Like other human institutions, courts and juries are not perfect. One cannot have a system of criminal punishment without accepting the possibility that someone will be punished mistakenly.

I don't believe in the death penalty. I believe that there are other people as we speak right now in prison, wrongfully accused, who could serve such a fate. That is injustice at its greatest.

Of one thing, however, I am certain. Just as an execution without adequate safeguards is unacceptable, so too is an execution when the condemned prisoner can prove that he is innocent. The execution of a person who can show that he is innocent comes perilously close to simple murder.

To die for faction is a common evil, But to be hanged for nonsense is the devil.

And so you take criminal caitiffs, murderers, and the like, and hang them on gibbets "for an example to deter others." Whereupon arise friends of humanity, and object. With very great reason, as I consider, if your hypothesis be correct. What right have you to hang any poor creature "for an example"? He can turn round upon you and say, "Why make an 'example' of me, a merely ill-situated, pitiable man? Have you no more respect for misfortune? Misfortune, I have been told, is sacred. And yet you hang me, now I am fallen into your hands; choke the life out of me, for an example! Again I ask, Why make an example of me, for your own convenience alone?

I think there are more anarchists bred in those places (lower criminal courts of New York City) than are made in the meetings of the anarchistic clubs. I think that many a man who in his heart is innocent and who is brought up by the police unfairly before a court which handles him unfairly, whatever may be the reason, goes out with a feeling of hatred toward the institutions which we desire to sustain.

Circumstances may accumulate so strongly even against an innocent man, that directed, sharpened, and pointed, they may slay him.

I will always be against the death penalty until the infallibility of human judgement is demonstrated to me.

Some wonder why I have such a feeling of concern over the imposition of the death penalty. I ask those who wonder how would you feel if you defended a man charged with murder, who was as innocent as any hon. member in this House at this very moment, who was convicted; whose appeal was dismissed, who was executed; and six months later the star witness for the Crown admitted that he, himself, had committed the murder and blamed it on the accused? That experience will never be effaced from my memory.

The justice system [in Mexico] is totally inoperative…. 2 percent of all crime is someone put in jail. How bad is that?

The system of death-penalty justice is compromised and inequitable.

I put perople in prison for too long. I had no choice.

L. Ram Saran Das was sentenced to death in 1915, and the sentence was later commuted to life transportation. Today myself, sitting in the condemned cell, I can let the readers know as authoritatively that the life-imprisonment is comparatively a far harder lot than that of death.