Michael T. Flynn Quotes
When you are given immunity that means that you've probably committed a crime.
Flynn, Michael T. Interview by Chuck Todd. Meet the Press, NBC, 25 Sep. 2016.
This is one of the many statements of President Bush that contributed to his reputation as a polarizing politician. His supporters turned to this statement to illustrate that Bush was a supporter of the Constitution and civil liberties by urging the nation not to engage in vigilantism or give vent to their stereotypic views of minorities. Detractors took the same statement as a perfect example of Bush’s assault on Constitutional freedoms. Law enforcement does not determine guilt or innocence in our system. Police and prosecutors in America do not determine guilt or innocence; juries do. They argue that the Bush administration law enforcement policies are designed to have law enforcement usurp more and more of this facet of criminal justice.
Aristotle adopted this view later in his Nichomachean Ethics. Mytilene was ddat war with Athens. Pittacus suggested that instead of the armies fighting, the war should be decided by a battle between him and the Athenian General who accepted. Pittacus won and was the Ruler of Athens, where he became quite popular. He wrote all his laws and decrees in poetry. He resigned after 10 years. He was considered one of the 7 great Greek Sages.
This interesting historical quotation illustrates the fact that in almost every American generation there are those who believe that society has gone too far in protecting the rights of criminal suspects at the expense of law and order in the general society. This is nothing new. This is a classic argument given by those who would deny a defendant the Constitutional protection against self-incrimination. The belief that an innocent man has nothing to fear from the police is refuted by the many cases of innocent men being convicted by evidence they have given in the belief that they were innocent, and served long jail sentences only to later be proved by DNA evidence that they could not possibly have been guilty. Since Nott’s day, society has not only found many cases where honest error was made by the police or prosecutors, but many where there was venal prosecutorial misconduct and defendants were jailed even though the authorities were aware of evidence of innocence and kept it secret. There have been a number of these cases where a defendant was on death row and about to be executed when it was found he was innocent. Probably there have been men wrongly executed. See {629444} for a probable example.
Reacting after reading parts of the Pentagon Papers, a study on the history of the Vietnam war he had ordered:
