Tom C. Clark Quotes
In the ultimate analysis, only the jury can strip a man of his liberty or his life.
Thomas C. Clark, 1899-1977, [Tom Clark], U. S. Supreme Court Justice, U. S. Attorney General (Democrat), Irvin v. Dowd, 366 U.S. 717, 722, 1961
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
Note that in his very definition of a Petty Jury the right of the jury to ignore the judge's instructions in criminal matters wasa assumed--not some novel idea. Jury nullification has been a part of the American Criminal Justice System from the inception of the nation.
There was quite a bit of racism in the American West. Not the last sentence referring to the complexion of the defendant.
This clause is a real puzzlement to non-Muslims throughout the world. What it means is that a person is allowed to murder certain other people—the “blood” was permitted. These include homosexuals, heretics. blasphemers, and those individuals who have had Fatwas—Islamic legal opinions—calling for their death as enemies of Islam. So if a Muslim cleric issues a fatwa calling for the death of someone, anyone who can kill the person will be exonerated. Under Sharia, a Muslim who murders his own daughter or sister because she violated the sexual taboos of Islam, is exonerated because in this case the blood of the victim was permitted. It is the same for murdering a homosexual, or someone who converts from Islam to Christianity.
Trotsky was castigated in Russia and found “guilty” of a host of crimes for his dissident communist views. The American communists generally fell into line, but a number of the leading intellectuals established their own Commission—headed by John Dewey to investigate Trotsky. Their finding created the first major split in American communist circles and started a process of intellectual alienation from the Communist party. Trotsky was in exile in Mexico where Stalin’s agents tracked him down and assassinated him further alienating many American intellectuals.
This is one of the many statements of President Bush that contributed to his reputation as a polarizing politician. His supporters turned to this statement to illustrate that Bush was a supporter of the Constitution and civil liberties by urging the nation not to engage in vigilantism or give vent to their stereotypic views of minorities. Detractors took the same statement as a perfect example of Bush’s assault on Constitutional freedoms. Law enforcement does not determine guilt or innocence in our system. Police and prosecutors in America do not determine guilt or innocence; juries do. They argue that the Bush administration law enforcement policies are designed to have law enforcement usurp more and more of this facet of criminal justice.
This quotation has become an operational principle of most justice systems of industrial democracies.
Thomas Campbell Clark was an American lawyer who served as the 59th United States Attorney General from 1945 to 1949 and as an Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court from 1949 to 1967.
