Publilius Syrus Quotes

The judge is condemned when the guilty is absolved.

I therefore believe that our system does not have a word for failed trial, and that is where the American public does not realize that our criminal justice system sometimes makes mistakes.

Unfortunately, what many people forget is that judges are just lawyers in robes.

I had seen so many injustices done in the court by well-meaning people. I had lost fourteen clients to gang violence in only seven years. I was angry at a system I thought had failed my clients, and I was part of it.

Our criminal justice system is fallible. We know it, even though we don't like to admit it. It is fallible despite the best efforts of most within it to do justice. And this fallibility is, at the end of the day, the most compelling, persuasive, and winning argument against a death penalty.

It is better that a guilty man should not be brought to trial than that he should be acquitted.

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

As, for the safety of society, we commit honest maniacs to Bedlam, so judges should be withdrawn from the bench, whose erroneous biases are leading us to dissolution.

Judges are objects of aversion and distrust.

It is easier to learn to fly by flapping one's arms than it is to get a district attorney to admit having sent an innocent person to prison.

I don’t think its right to have a criminal justice system that puts innocent people to death.

The Supreme Court has made it nearly impossible to prove race discrimination in the criminal justice system.

I am convinced that, because the criminal justice system is run by humans, it is naturally subject to human error. There is no rational basis to believe that this same type of human error will not infect capital murder trials.

I find it deeply upsetting when I see justice not being served. How do we as human beings deal with the unknown? The West Memphis Three trial is a joke on so many different levels.

There are so many laws that no one is safe from hanging.

Unfortunately, the truth is that people do go scot-free and it's unfair. A lot of the top drug people who have been arrested are also free.

Oh, law and order! I often think it is that that is at the bottom of all the misery in the world.

The punishment of a criminal is an example to the rabble; but every decent man is concerned if an innocent person is condemned.

Laws ... proportionate and mild should never be dispensed with. Let mercy be the character of the law-giver, but let the judge be a mere machine.

In the United States we have a society pervaded from top to bottom by contempt for the law.

There is no man so good, who, were he to submit all his thoughts and actions to the laws, would not deserve hanging ten times in his life.

But by this time I was acutely conscious of the gap between law and justice. I knew that the letter of the law was not as important as who held the power in any real-life situation.

Describing the jury in the OJ Simpson murder trial: These people have served a longer sentence than some people who have committed murder.

Many states and even many people who are in support of the death penalty question their support of the death penalty because of the imperfection of our courts. Through DNA testing, we don't always get it right, even with that.

The more you look at the death penalty, that's where you see that we're actually not killing the worst of the worst. We're killing the poorest of the poor. Where actually one of the biggest determinants of who gets executed is how many resources they have to defend themselves.