Mark Twain Quotes

I would not be convicted by a jury of my peers, still crazy after all these years.

It would be an outrage against civilization if he were sent to jail for an act which was the product of a diseased brain

As a former attorney general. I have the greatest respect for the criminal justice system. But it is not good at intelligence gathering.

Crime and legal stories, broadly speaking, are just where my interest happens to lie.

...it must be clearly proved that, at the time of committing the act, the party accused was labouring under such a defect of reason, from disease of mind, as not to know the nature and quality of the act he was doing was wrong; or, if he did know it, that he did not know what he was doing was wrong.

Our job is to incarcerate offenders and not hospitalize sick people…. We are reluctant to advocate better mental help facilities within our jail as it would only attract more people in need of mental health services

A judge is much more likely to see a mentally ill person than is a psychiatrist. Each year over 1 million mentally ill people are arrested

The jails and prisons are the new insane asylums. That’s what we are.

The majority of the people in jail are suffering from mental illness.

Violent felons and people with mental health problems need to be rehabilitated.

By incarcerating someone who is homeless or addicted or who suffers from mental health challenges, we only further destabilize that person and create situations where they are more likely to commit crimes in the future.

During the 10 years I worked as a prosecutor, I always struggled with what to do with someone who was clearly mentally ill and committed a horrific crime.

I think we need to update the existing laws to create uniformity across the states so that all people with mental illness who find themselves in the criminal justice system for committing horrific crimes will be treated exactly the same.

He plead insanity like they do now all the time. Sir, what would you have done in 1859?

I went to law school and took a law degree, and counseled all my clients to plead insanity.

I have seen the cycle of a non-violent, mentally ill offender who is arrested repeatedly and put into the system repeatedly-never being treated for his illness and, as a result, becoming more and more ill.

We have an insanity plea that would have saved Cain.

The idea began to sink in, more than it ever had, that I might be crazy, in the traditional sense of the word. That I might be, forever and ever amen, a Crazy Person. That's what we'd suspected all along, what I'd been working so hard to disprove, what might be true. I preferred, by far, being dead.

Heaven knows insanity was disreputable enough, long ago; but now that the lawyers have got to cutting every gallows rope and picking every prison lock with it, it is become a sneaking villainy that ought to hang and keep on hanging its sudden possessors until evil-doers should conclude that the safest plan was to never claim to have it until they came by it legitimately. The very calibre of the people the lawyers most frequently try to save by the insanity subterfuge ought to laugh the plea out of the courts, one would think.

Of course, as a German, I wouldn't like to tell the American people how to handle their criminal justice.

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

Three strikes, you're out. I don't care if you hire Edward Bennett Williams to defend you; three strikes, you're still out. Baseball is an island of stability in an unstable world.

In the case of The Thin Blue Line, I was surprised actually by many things. I was shooting down in Texas where the actual killer David Harris lived and I interviewed the town cop. He described these guys as being David Harris' partners in crime and even though they had criminal records and had committed crimes, they sued me! More often than not, the insurance company that protects you against this type of lawsuit will settle it with cash and contest it in a court of law.

Today, criminal justice functions and justifies itself only by this perpetual reference to something other than itself, by this unceasing reinscription in non-juridical systems.

I had a very dear friend of mine, ton of potential, and he fell ill with bipolar disorder. And he was put in the penal system. And that was just adding fuel to the fire. He got worse. He came out and he's never been the same since. He can't seem to get his life back. And this is a man who could have had Hollywood in the palm of his hand. A lot of my inspiration and aspirations for wanting to be an actor, I owe to him. Between the disorder and him being put in jail, it just snuffed all of that away from him.