Maria Ressa Quotes

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

Due process does not require that every conceivable step be taken, at whatever cost, to eliminate the possibility of convicting an innocent person. To conclude otherwise would all but paralyze our system for enforcement of the criminal law.

We are not supposed to go out and kill all those we suspect to have committed a crime.

I therefore believe that our system does not have a word for failed trial, and that is where the American public does not realize that our criminal justice system sometimes makes mistakes.

The United States government can indict you on something, and now you've got to prove your innocence. And that's not the Constitution of the United States.

Lawyers claim that their clients have been grossly mistreated, which is what criminal defense lawyers are paid to do.

The vast majority of A.D.A.s put everything on the line to make sure justice is served. That's what I love about prosecutors and the New York police.

I've never been arrested in my life. Never had cuffs put on me, never been charged with a crime, never spent one day in jail.

They got the judges / They got the lawyers / They got the jury rolls / They got the law / They don’t come by ones. / They got the sheriffs / They got the deputies / They don’t come by twos. / They got the shotguns / They got the rope / We git the justice / In the end / And they come by tens.

Our criminal justice system affirmatively depends on inequality.

A person who is no longer with us has a rather difficult time proving his innocence …. In Texas and elsewhere in the country, people’s innocence is determined by their income.

Law enforcement does not ask an advantage in its struggle with the lawless. It asks only that the scales of justice be balanced. The cause of justice is not served when hardened criminals are allowed to go free through legal technicalities.

I am not yet ready to agree that America is so possessed with evil that we must level all constitutional barriers to give our civil authorities the tools to catch criminals.

The innocent are frequently punished instead of the guilty

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.

Using legally approved tricks and lies, the detective coerces a false confession. Hiding facts that support innocence, the prosecutor forces a dubious plea of guilt. The judge sentences for acquitted conduct, as she is allowed to do. The defense attorney for the poor, overworked because of underfunding by the state, fails to summon sufficient resources to investigate and rebut. The legal immigrant is deported with no meaningful access to constitutional rights. These intrusions are woven into the statutes and enabled by courts

When you live in a world in which juveniles are much more likely to be stopped—or if stopped, be arrested, or if arrested, be adjudicated—if they are Black, then all of the indicators associated with prior criminal history are going to be serving effectively as a proxy for race.

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

These exonerations do not indicate that there is something wrong with the Texas Criminal Justice System. They demonstrate that the system is working. We have a lengthy and methodical process of appeals. And that is a great and good mark for Texas.

… when it is shown to us that a person is serving an illegal sentence our obligation is to direct that proper steps be taken to correct the wrong done, without regard to the character of a particular defendant or to the possible effect on others who might also want to challenge the legality of their sentences as they have the right to do 'at any time' under Rule 35. If it has any relevance at all, the fact that there may be other prisoners in this country's jails serving illegal sentences would seem to me to make it all the more imperative that we grant appropriate relief in this case rather than search for some obviously dubious excuse to deny this petitioner's claim..

A judge sometimes must release a criminal. He doesn't like it, she doesn't like it, but the law requires it. And the context of an election in which you are "soft on crime" betrays a misunderstanding of the judicial process and a misunderstanding of the Constitution.

To be on the other side of the law-and-order machine in this country is awful. It is dehumanizing and degrading and deforming. It fills you with a helpless rage because, once there, you can only make things worse for yourself by speaking up.

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.

Many of the old forms of discrimination that we supposedly left behind during the Jim Crow era are suddenly legal again, once you've been branded a felon.

While not explicitly articulated in the Constitution, the presumption of innocence has, through Supreme Court opinions, become a fundamental tenet of our criminal-justice system, and rightly so.