Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. Quotes
I think it less evil that some criminals should escape than that the government should play an ignoble part.
“Playing an Ignoble part” meant doing things that were against the law or skating on the edge or were immoral even if not explicitly illegal. He and the other Supreme Court justices believed these improprieties were very common at the time with local and federal law enforcement. Historically, we now know that is was even worse than he and his contemporaries realized.
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., 1841-1935, U. S. Supreme Court Justice, Olmstead V U.S. 1928
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This is one of the major reasons that the relations between police and the communities they are policing is so important. Also, the style and courtesy that the IRS tax collectors exhibit is very important.
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.
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. was an American jurist who served as an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States from 1902 to 1932. Noted for his long service, concise and pithy opinions, and deference to the decisions of elected legislatures, he is one of the most widely cited United States Supreme Court justices in history, particularly for opinions on civil liberties and American constitutional democracy, and is one of the most influential American common law judges, honored during his lifetime in Great Britain as well as the United States. Holmes retired from the court at the age of 90, an unbeaten record for oldest justice in the federal Supreme Court (although John Paul Stevens was only 8 months younger when he retired on April 12, 2010). He previously served as an Associate Justice and as Chief Justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court, and was Weld Professor of Law at his alma mater, Harvard Law School.
