Stephen Breyer Quotes
It doesn't help to fight crime to put people in prison who are innocent.
He was referring to exonerations for capital crimes like murder. He had written a book about a case where a man who was later proved innocent was reprieved only 5 days before his execution.
Texas executes more people than the rest of the United States does. However, just before the debate an investigation disclosed 56 recent cases in Texas where the “criminals” were completely exonerated based on the work of some volunteer attorneys and law students. They were all released from jail where many had served decades for crimes they did not commit. 5 were released from Death Row—awaiting to be executed. See {635339}.
a dozen grand jury probes In 2000 Edwards was convicted.
Mistakes in the criminal justice system have been with us from the birth of the nation.
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.
He was describing a real case in Canada. There as well as the United State, for those who oppose capital punishment give as their main reason the mistakes made by the criminal justice system, and the innocent people who have been executed.
Stephen Gerald Breyer is an American lawyer, jurist, and legal scholar who is serving as an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. He was nominated by President Bill Clinton on May 17, 1994, and has served since August 3, 1994.
