Warren E. Burger Quotes
It is indeed an odd business that it has taken this Court nearly two centuries to 'discover' a constitutional mandate to have counsel at a preliminary hearing.
Burger, Warren E. Dissenting opinion. Coleman v. Alabama. 399 U.S. 1. Supreme Court of the United States, 1970, p. 22.
This quotation is a great example of the difficulty of deciding some of the major Constitutional issues. Most reasonable people believe that Rehnquist certainly has a point. On the other hand, critics observe that this quotation essentially says that it is OK to convict an innocent person if it cost too much or be too much trouble to do so. Reasonable people would also agree that this objection has much merit also. So the judicial system is stuck with deciding when the cost or trouble is too much. There will never, can never, be a clear cut answer.
The choice is usually contrasted between guilty persons going free, rather an innocent one be adjudicated guilty. But here the justice tells us that the avoidance of an innocent person being subject to easy arrest is important enough to have a system where guilty people sometimes escape justice.
Warren Earl Burger was the 15th Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court, serving from 1969 to 1986. Born in Saint Paul, Minnesota, Burger graduated from the St. Paul College of Law in 1931. He helped secure the Minnesota delegation's support for Dwight D. Eisenhower at the 1952 Republican National Convention. After Eisenhower won the 1952 presidential election, he appointed Burger to the position of Assistant Attorney General in charge of the Civil Division. In 1956, Eisenhower appointed Burger to the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. Burger served on this court until 1969 and became known as a critic of the Warren Court.
