Shira Scheindlin Quotes

The fact that the United States, with less than 5 percent of the world's population incarcerates 25% of the world's prisoners is largly due to manditory minimum sentences.

I put perople in prison for too long. I had no choice.

While I bore the titel of "Honorable Judge", I felt less than honorable and moroe like a complicit tool of an unjust system.

At least 80 percent of American prisoners are grossly over-sentenced. The Supreme Court knows this, but shows scant concern for this human side of criminal justice.

There are reasons to doubt that our criminal justice system is fundamentally just.

Mandatory minimum sentences should be abolished.

Every punishment is based, not on logic or the feeling of justice, but on the desire to wish evil on those who have done evil to you or to another person…. Everything about our present system of punishments and about all criminal law will be thought of by future generations in the same way that we think of cannibalism or human sacrifice to the pagan gods. “How did they not see the uselessness and cruelty of those things which they did?” our descendants will say about us.

The criminal law tries to define moral standards.

You can make a very good argument that society would be much worse off if you let 10 rapists and murderers free rather than put one poor, wrongly accused accountant in prison. And so my only point on that is that it should open up an argument. It should not sort of settle one, because nobody disagrees with it.

If we believe in our current penal process, then the penalties imposed by judges and juries should be the only sanctions for one's crime, not the invisible sanctions of the legislature.

Now, I - for several years while I was researching this book, I felt quite obsessed by thoughts about sentencing, punishment, how judges arrive at their decisions.

Mandatory sentencing guidelines have become as complicated and detailed as the IRS code!

Torture produces unreliable evidence and therefore doesn't achieve and protect anybody. Torture corrupts those who are doing the torturing.

We cannot and should not repeal Article 17. We have to allow for the individualization of punishment and we have to take into consideration the emotional state of the perpetrator when he committed the crime. This prerogative is given to judges in the West as well.

I can tell you this on a stack of Bibles: prisons are archaic, brutal, unregenerative, overcrowded hell holes where the inmates are treated like animals with absolutely not one humane thought given to what they are going to do once they are released.

There is no good reason why police, or gaols, or the administration of justice, should be differently managed in one part of the kingdom and in another.

Every law must be just in every part of it, but if the penalty annexed be unjust, how can it be held forth as a just law?

All judges had rather that ten innocent should suffer than that one guilty should escape

The principal end a prince was made for is to take care, that every one should have his rights. This ought to engage him to study not only the science of those great civilians, who ascend to the first principles of law, which regulate human society, and are the basis as it were of government and politics; but also that part of the law, which descends to the affairs of particular persons. This branch is generally left for the gentlemen of the long robe, and not admitted into the education of princes, though they are every day to pass judgment upon the fortunes, liberties, lives, honor, and reputation of their subjects. Princes are continually talked to of valour and liberality; but if justice do not regulate these two qualities, they degenerate into the most odious vices. Without justice valour does nothing but destroy; and liberality is only a foolish profuseness. Justice keeps all in order, and contains within bounds him, who distributes it, as well as those, to whom it is distributed.

The highest law is often the greatest wrong..

Ethical and legal are not synonyms. ;

The criminal justice system is not working and people want something that works.

I believe that even if a criminal defendant has committed a heinous wrong, they should still be treated with respect from everyone in the criminal justice system, including prosecutors

The majority of our criminals that we lock up are non-violent offenders.

It is a core principle that prosecutors should charge and pursue the most serious readily provable offense.