David K. Shipler Quotes
Using legally approved tricks and lies, the detective coerces a false confession. Hiding facts that support innocence, the prosecutor forces a dubious plea of guilt. The judge sentences for acquitted conduct, as she is allowed to do. The defense attorney for the poor, overworked because of underfunding by the state, fails to summon sufficient resources to investigate and rebut. The legal immigrant is deported with no meaningful access to constitutional rights. These intrusions are woven into the statutes and enabled by courts
David K. Shipler, Journalist & Historian, The Limits of Liberty in Modern America, 2012
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
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.
The Senator was arguing against a bill to correct an aspect of the immigration law where infants and very young clildren are broght to the United States by parents who entered illegally. The children grow up in the United States—the only country and home that they have ever known. American law required that they be deported to “their countries” which they have no memory of and many do not even speak the language or know the culture. Sessions, is an example of the view that law defines justice. Therefore laws cannot be unjust nor can enforcing the law. Opponents point out that even in the United States we have, in earlier times, “enforced the law” which we came to regret and see as an injustice. The Fugitive slave laws, the Southern racial discrimination laws, and the law allowing Japanese American Citizens to be interned and lose their land during WWII are a few examples of laws, the enforcement of which is seen by most Americans as having been unjust. The execution of “witches” in early America was in conformity with the law.
David K. Shipler is an American author. He won the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-fiction in 1987 for Arab and Jew: Wounded Spirits in a Promised Land. He also wrote the book, The Working Poor: Invisible in America. Formerly, he was a foreign correspondent of The New York Times. He has taught at many colleges and universities. Since 2010, he has published the electronic journal, The Shipler Report.
