John Simon Quotes
Michael Taylor is not being executed for homicide. Michael Taylor is being executed for raping a white female.
Simon, John. Quoted in "Lawyer Cites Racism in Missouri Execution Case." Associated Press, 25 Feb. 2014.
The governor had initiated a study of the implementation of the death penalty in Maryland.
The Senator was referring to the large number of people who had been exonerated by DNA evidence while on Death Row.
To put the fine in perspective 200 shillings was the penalty for poisoning someone whereas 15 shillings was the penalty for trespassing and trampling someone’s crops. Even slandering a woman’s chastity carried a very severe penalty. The Salic Law is one of the very few documentations of the Merovingian dynasty.
This early New England law illustrates some interesting aspects of Colonial law enforcement and philosophy. Massachusetts was perhaps the most religiously rigid and orthodox of the colonies. Yet in the case of rape, they did not always follow the Mosaic Law as some other colonies did. Instead, they had the concept of judicial discretion built into their sentencing. The other point of interest is that there was an “age of consent” albeit, for a female it was 10 years old.
This quotation is often incorrectly ascribed to Joseph Stalin whose approach to dissidents comported with Monteverde.
Althought most of Seale’s “solutions” were counterproductive and/or ineffectual, and the Black Panthers were regarded as public enemies, Seale was right about some of his complaints including this one. In most of the South the changes forced by the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts where just beginning to have significant effect. So there were proportionately very few Blacks on Southern Juries. Even in the North, Blacks did not register to vote in proportion to their numbers so since jury pools were then usually drawn from voter registration lists, Blacks were statistically underrepresented. When a few Blacks were put on a jury panel, the prosecutor had the right of preemptory challenge as did the defense. But there were enough challenges so that the prosecutor could disqualify all the African Americans on the Jury. Even today, this is legal in many jurisdictions and although better than in 1970, then a Black defendant would rarely have African Americans on the jury of “his peers.”
So many politicians and leaders, cheered by the multitude, actually believe the adulation is for them uniquely.
John Ivan Simon was an American author and literary, theater, and film critic.
