Federico Hernandez Denton Quotes
Slow justice is not justice.
There is a constant tension between swift justice and due process. Some say that “justice delayed is justice denied” but at the same time the worst injustice is to rush to judgment and convict the wrong person or fail to convict the perpetrator because the prosecution was insufficiently prepared. Both are major problems of our criminal justice system.
Federico Hernandez Denton, Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Puerto Rico, Interview with Caribbean Business, May 17, 2007
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
A case of systemic racial discrimination against a Bank of America subsidiary which she had initiated in 2008 had been resolved by the Bank paying over $200 million to the victims.
The Mishnah was the first written codification of ancient Jewish laws and interpretations. The Books of Moses--the first 5 Books of the Old Testament was the fundamental law--God's law. The Mishnah was a combintion of administative and policy manuals and judicial precedents.
Prosecutors, even ones who are frequent lawbreakers themselves violating defendant's rights or illegally manipulating trials, are reluctant to be officially found to have done so. Many politicians start their political careers as prosecutors and then rise to higher office. If it is officially found that they had abused a defendant and violated the law, it can be detrimental to their careers. So in many states, they have placed barriers making it much harder for an improperly convicted person to even get a court hearing. The cost to society however is that they are never accountable, and people have been wrongly imprisoned and cannot even get a hearing to prove that they were the victims of official misconduct. The rationale for these rules that prevent victims from obtaining fairness and justice is finality—the concept that there should be some end to the process of appeals so justice can be said to have been done. It prevents a kind of closure for many of the victims of crimes and their families if the guilty perpetrator is constantly appealing or can do so.
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.
In modern America, we have improved somewhat. Now both kinds of issues take many years.
Federico Hernández Denton in Santurce, Puerto Rico was the 15th Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Puerto Rico.
