Sunny Hostin Quotes

I was determined to become a criminal lawyer and help look after the poor.

Separate and unequal didn't work 100 years ago. It will not work today.

Our criminal justice system affirmatively depends on inequality.

The first thing a good lawyer does is immediately presume the guilt of his client.

... if the United States is indeed the great melting pot, the Negro either didn't get in the pot or he didn't get melted down.

Never before has a supposedly free country denied basic liberty to so many of its citizens. In December 2006, some 2.25 million persons were being held in the nearly 5,000 prisons and jails that are scattered across America’s urban and rural landscapes…. On average, state inmates have fewer than 11 years of schooling. They are also vastly disproportionately black and brown.

Blacks - and critically. black elites - remain skeptical of the procedural fairness of the criminal justice system, while white elites, Democrats and Republicans alike, are more willing to embrace a “law and order” approach to criminal law enforcement.

In representing criminal defendants—especially guilty ones—it is often necessary to take the offensive against the government: to put the government on trial for its misconduct.

One third of African American males are destined to be in prison sometime in their lifetime.

It's an unfortunate fact that in the male black population, a very significant percentage of them, more so than whites or other minority candidates, because of convictions, prison records, are never going to be hired by a police department. That's a reality. That's not a byproduct of stop-and-frisk.

Time begins the healing process of wounds cut deeply by oppression. We soothe ourselves with the salve of attempted indifference, accepting the false pattern set up by the horrible restriction of Jim Crow laws.

Black and brown communities are significantly and disproportionately impacted by deficiencies in our criminal justice system.

The people who have been unjustly disenfranchised by our criminal justice system and the people who daily fight for them always have, and always will be, the inspiration and focus of my efforts.

I think our criminal justice system has two problems. We have systematic problems and we have people problems. So if the hearts of people are not about justice than any system you have won't work.

When I served as a prosecutor, I saw firsthand the many injustices that are embedded in our communities. But I also saw the difference it can make in someone's life when they have someone to stand up and fight for them.

It's deeply rooted in the American psyche. Black men have always been viewed as the other, which leads to a different application of the laws. The current laws are an obscenity. More black men are locked up for using pot than white folk are for far more serious crimes.

If you're white and you're rich in the USA, if you get busted for drugs, you get a good attorney, and you in all likelihood serve no time. But if you're poor, black, Hispanic, or poor and white for that matter, you can get put in jail.

Being a public defender makes you incredibly paranoid - and I would say with reason - about law enforcement.

I think the African American community, the Latino community, the Native American communities have borne an unfair burden in the last century, and continue to.

Stop and search is an integral cog in a racially disproportionate criminal justice system.

Differences in racial outcomes are not the same thing as institutional racism any more than the fact that far more men than women are locked up is evidence of institutional sexism.

Johnnie Cochran was such a heroic figure for getting the acquittal of O.J. Simpson, and the acquittal was such a historical event because it was the first time that I'd seen somebody who looked like me have the criminal justice system work in their favor rather than against.

My mother negotiated a plea deal, and my father went to trial. I think one thing we notice in their case that kind of stands out is how, in some ways, arbitrary the outcomes in the criminal justice system can be. And they did basically the same thing, identical thing.

My perception has changed from thinking if someone's in jail they're supposed to be, to there's a lot of factors that's not that simple.

Dwayne Betts is the kind of man who should be receiving awards from the Connecticut bar. Instead, he hasn't been admitted.