John Buckley Quotes

Swift justice demands more than just swiftness.

You know that murder is wicked. If you saw your master kill a man, do you suppose this would be any excuse for you, if you should commit the same crime?

The crime and not the scaffold makes the shame.

My job as a prosecutor is to do justice. And justice is served when a guilty man is convicted and an innocent man is not.

It is the crime not the scaffold which is the disgrace.

Our sense of fairness tells us that people should pay for the wrong they do.

I believe in justice, and I believe in people being held responsible for their actions.

One threatens the innocent who spares the guilty.

A murder is not a martyr. He or she is just a murderer.

There is no such thing as justice—in or out of court.

Mercy to the guilty is cruelty to the innocent.

I found that the death penalty  -  and I'm not a hot-button issue person, you know, I'm not a single issue person  -  but what I think drew me to the death penalty is because it raises some very deep, fundamental questions like: Is anybody beyond redemption?

To spare the guilty is to injure the innocent.

No one so dislikes being punished unjustly as the person who might have been punished justly on scores of previous occasions, if he had only been found out.

Rather leave the crime of the guilty unpunished than condemn the innocent.

Where do murderers go, man! Who's to doom, when the judge himself is dragged to the bar?

The goal is justice, not executions. We all want to make sure the process is fair and that the right person is punished. These recommendations are essential to that goal.

Those who commit injustice bear the greatest burden.

Everybody has to be responsible for their own actions - and if they do something wrong, I believe in paying for it.

To have the truth in your possession you can be found guilty, sentenced to death.

It is impossible to tell where the law stops and justice begins.

I don't want to put one innocent person to death to put 99 that are guilty to death. So philosophically I'm a tooth-for-tooth guy, but the reality is the death penalty as public policy is flawed.

Victims suggest innocence. And innocence, by the inexorable logic that governs all relational terms, suggests guilt.

This death sentence is not surprising. It had to be.

It's better to choose the culprits than to seek them out.