David Lammy Quotes

Our criminal justice system affirmatively depends on inequality.

Stop and search is an integral cog in a racially disproportionate criminal justice system.

The reason I like the criminal justice system is there aren't Republican or Democrat victims or police officers or prosecutors. It's about respect for the rule of law!

The most sacred of the duties of a government [is] to do equal and impartial justice to all its citizens.

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.

And Justice for Some

When you live in a world in which juveniles are much more likely to be stopped—or if stopped, be arrested, or if arrested, be adjudicated—if they are Black, then all of the indicators associated with prior criminal history are going to be serving effectively as a proxy for race.

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

Black and brown communities are significantly and disproportionately impacted by deficiencies in our criminal justice system.

At the end of the day, the law is the same for the Prime Minister or a common man of India.

If stop-and-frisk was a fair and balanced practice that targeted everybody equally across the board, then I could understand the extra precautions being taken, but since it's a practice that targets blacks and Hispanics and gives the police the right to lawfully profile us, I'm not with it.

There can be racism in a system even if a particular episode of injustice is not a manifestation of that racism. Every single thing in the criminal justice system is not a manifestation of racism, but many things are.

For me, justice is the prime condition of humanity.

I know a lot of law officers, and every single one of them faces a moment - usually after about three hours on the job - when they realise that there's no connection between law and justice. The law, as an institution, avoids justice, subverts it, just as often as it sees it done.

More law, less justice.

Man is unique in creation because he has a sense of justice and truth. We spend billions of dollars each year to set up court systems to see that justice is done, and we build prisons for those who transgress the laws we enact.

It is the spirit and not the form of law that keeps justice alive.

Black jurors sit on juries every day and convict black people every day.

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

In the dispensation of justice, no distinction is to be admitted, whether between the man of wealth or the poor man, the master or the slave, the European or the Hottentot.

We spend an awful lot of money on the criminal justice system that could better be spent at the other end of the spectrum.

In the criminal justice system, the law-abiding citizen comes first.

The law is equal before all of us; but we are not all equal before the law

Our criminal justice system was designed to be fair and is the fairest system known to man.

The government may set decoys to entrap criminals. But it may nor provoke or create a crime, and then punish the criminal, its creature.