Brian Banks Quotes

I therefore believe that our system does not have a word for failed trial, and that is where the American public does not realize that our criminal justice system sometimes makes mistakes.

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.

We've sent 130 men to death row to be executed in this country, at least 130 that we know of, who have later have been exonerated because they were either innocent, or they were not fairly tried. That's 130 people that we've locked down on death row. And they've spent years there.

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

All prisons are brimming over with innocence. It is those who cram their fellows into them, in the name of empty ideas, who are the only guilty ones.

There is no client as scary as an innocent man.

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.

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

More than 100 people have been sent to death row who were later exonerated because they weren't guilty or fairly tried. Most criminal defendants do not get adequate representation because there are not enough public defenders to represent them. There is a lot that is wrong.

Our criminal justice system is fallible. We know it, even though we don't like to admit it. It is fallible despite the best efforts of most within it to do justice. And this fallibility is, at the end of the day, the most compelling, persuasive, and winning argument against a death penalty.

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.

The idea that there aren't mistakes made constantly in the judicial system is too obvious even to need to mention.

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.

The death penalty scares the hell out of me. We now see about one out of eight errors in these convictions.

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.

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

We have a situation where a young man is basically convicted of his own murder.

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

We cannot afford to have the confidence of the public, victims, and witnesses in our justice system undermined because the wrong people are being found guilty and the real criminals are wandering the streets.

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.

There are many innocent people in prison.

From a victim's point of view, our justice system is hardly fit for purpose. No doubt individual failings by police and prosecutors provide part of the explanation.

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

When we look at our justice system, we have this image of a balancing scale: truth and justice, right and wrong. But for years, our system has been lopsided, where it's not about truth and justice or balance. It's about being tough on crime, and sometimes that means you're putting the wrong person behind bars.

There's an awful lot about our criminal justice system that is dysfunctional. Everyone who sets foot in a criminal courtroom will see myriad ways the system is dysfunctional.