Angela Davis Quotes

The States have always borne primary responsibility for operating the machinery of criminal justice within their borders, and adapting it to their peculiar circumstances.

America today is becoming a Prosecutocracy. Prosecutors have the power when over 97 percent of the convictions are without trial.

I spent time in, like, criminal courts, and covering murder trials for papers.

Doing a thing by law, or according to law, is only carrying the law into execution. And punishing a man by, or according to, the sentence or judgment of his peers, is only carrying that sentence or judgment into execution.

If you're dealing with criminals, they're not going to want to go to court.

Plea bargaining is a system that is best described as one of condemnation without adjudication. It is a system that replaces trial, which is what our constitution intended, with deals… those deals are coerced. The prosecutor is basically forcing people to waive their rights to jury trial by threatening them with ever greater sanctions if they refuse to plead and instead demand the right to jury trial.

Prosecutorial charging and plea bargaining discretion, jury discretion to convict of one or another amorphously distinguished capital or non-capital crime, and gubernatorial discretion to grant or withhold clemency are all equally uncontrolled and uncontrollable.

Plea Bargaining rests on the constitutional fiction that our government does not retaliate against individuals who wish to exercise their right to trial by jury.

The purpose of a jury is to guard against the exercise of arbitrary power—to make available the commonsense judgment of the community as a hedge against the over- zealous or mistaken prosecutor and in preference to the professional or perhaps overconditioned or biased response of a judge.

Can I suggest that the sheriff and the district attorney, in the lunch break, go out and read the Constitution.

The experience of being a prosecutor gives us a sort of proctologists view of our society.

And let the sheriffs who have arrested them bring them before the justice without any other summons.

The justice system is confused in trying to understand it, but frankly, if it paid attention to the really blatant cases and did a good job with that, we would be light years ahead of where we are now.

A judge sometimes must release a criminal. He doesn't like it, she doesn't like it, but the law requires it. And the context of an election in which you are "soft on crime" betrays a misunderstanding of the judicial process and a misunderstanding of the Constitution.

Thousands of people plead guilty to crimes every year in the United States because they know that the odds of a jury's believing their word over a police officer's are slim to none.

I know what it means to prosecute people.

Police and prosecutors and the courts have got to talk together.

The role of the federal prosecutor and the purpose of a criminal investigation are well-defined.

The law itself is on trial quite as much as the cause which is to be decided.

Of course, as a German, I wouldn't like to tell the American people how to handle their criminal justice.

Indictments of any kind are serious. That being said, let's not forget that an indictment is not a conviction. We still have due process in this country.

Prosecution I have managed to avoid; but I have been arrested, charged in a police court, have refused to be bound over, and thereupon have been unconditionally released - to my great regret; for I have always wanted to know what going to prison was like.

You don't hear TV cops griping because they have to enforce some Draconian law that shouldn't be on the books in the first place, or lamenting vindictive excesses in sentencing. Hollywood, supposedly a frothing cauldron of liberalism, has always been conservative on crime.

As a former attorney general. I have the greatest respect for the criminal justice system. But it is not good at intelligence gathering.

As a former home secretary, I have access to and knowledge of the workings of the system in a way that individuals unfamiliar with the courts can never hope to have.