Leonard Peltier Quotes

It would be great to do a story and get somebody who is innocent out of jail. That's a wonderful thing.

People have died in jail that have been innocent.

I spent 30 years on Alabama's death row for a crime I did not commit.

Two of the three men, who were imprisoned, Norman Butler and Robert 15x Johnson, convicted and given life sentences, I'm absolutely convinced were innocent. The real murderers of Malcolm X have not been caught or punished.

I am here wrongfully convicted and wrongfully sentenced.

What joy would I get from putting the wrong person behind bars?

The innocent are frequently punished instead of the guilty

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

I'd like to think that if I were in prison for a crime I didn't commit, someone would be trying to get me the hell out of there.

I had to grow up in prison for something I did not do.

I directed and produced Conviction, a movie about a man who spent 18 years in prison for a crime he didn't commit. I got to know Innocence Project co-founder Barry Scheck very well - he's a character in the movie - and I got very passionate about the cause. It's just so inherently dramatic.

And that's the mission of The Innocence Project in New York, is to exonerate people who have been wrongfully convicted, and also work from a policy angle with Congress and state legislatures to prevent future wrongful convictions.

Wrongful convictions happen every week in every state in this country. And they happen for all the same reasons. Sloppy police work. Eyewitness identification is the most - is the worst type almost. Because it's wrong about half the time. Think about that.

I just think it's so outrageous that fifteen years is the kind of minimum amount of time that any wrongfully convicted person spends in prison.

It doesn't help to fight crime to put people in prison who are innocent.

How, possibly, could the police have made the 'mistake' of charging the wrong man with the notorious Red Light Bandit crimes? That also is something that is fully revealed in the Pandora's Box of facts I have prepared.

With the advent of DNA, we know that people have been convicted and sentenced to death who later proved not to be guilty of the crime.

The cops picked me up for attempted murder. I can still see the detectives, licking their chops. Thought they had me. Two weeks later, the cat came out of a coma and told the truth. I was innocent.

I used to always fight for human rights. I still fight for Leonard Peltier, who's spent 35 years in jail for a crime he didn't commit.

Every time when there is an exoneration, and there have been hundreds of them, and somebody walks out of jail after years, people ask, “how could this happen?” …. State sanctioned killing is just wrong.

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.

We cannot allow the spectacle of constant executions to be swept under the rug. We know that already over 100 individuals who were put on death row have been released. And we should shudder to think how many people have been sent to their deaths that were innocent.

Like other human institutions, courts and juries are not perfect. One cannot have a system of criminal punishment without accepting the possibility that someone will be punished mistakenly.

Society is now less convinced of the absolute accuracy of the criminal justice system.

There are many innocent people in prison.