Increase Mather Quotes
It is better that Ten Suspected Witches should escape, than that one Innocent Person should be condemned.
Increase Mather, 1639-1723, Massachusetts Cleric and Official, Case of Conscience Concerning Evil Spirits, 1693
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
This quotation has become an operational principle of most justice systems of industrial democracies.
Watkins was the first Dallas County Black DA. He was being interviewed because DNA testing proved that a man who had served 30 years in prison for rape and robbery, could not have committed the crime, and he had just been released. Watkins quotation was very significant because it set forth a philosophy that while extant in other areas of the country is almost unheard of in Texas, where there have been more innocent men convicted than in any other state. DAs in Texas usually fight every attempt to examine old evidence with modern tools.
This is the first appearance of the principle which guides law enforcement in most of America and the other industrialized democracies around the world. Texas and some other localities have rejected this notion and see the occasional execution of an innocent person the cost we must pay in order to preserve law and order.
Mistakes in the criminal justice system have been with us from the birth of the nation.
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}.
Increase Mather was an American Puritan clergyman in the Massachusetts Bay Colony and president of Harvard College for twenty years (1681–1701). He was influential in the administration of the colony during a time that coincided with the notorious Salem witch trials.
