Criminal Justice System Quotes
The increase compared to the rest of the world really occurred in the 1980s when The War on Drugs began jailing drug users and dealers and that accounts for the major difference. The 3000 different federal crimes, if an accurate number, is all the more remarkable because in America, the major part of law enforcement is handled by the state and local governments.
Mistakes in the criminal justice system have been with us from the birth of the nation.
Kennedy had financed bootlegging operations and had himself been involved in many shady stock deals.
This quotation is a great example of the difficulty of deciding some of the major Constitutional issues. Most reasonable people believe that Rehnquist certainly has a point. On the other hand, critics observe that this quotation essentially says that it is OK to convict an innocent person if it cost too much or be too much trouble to do so. Reasonable people would also agree that this objection has much merit also. So the judicial system is stuck with deciding when the cost or trouble is too much. There will never, can never, be a clear cut answer.
This quotation has become an operational principle of most justice systems of industrial democracies.
Two openings appeared on the Supreme Court for Nixon to fill. He heard from many people on recommendations, but he wanted to fill the posts with “strict constructionists.” Rehnquist had written giving him a political operational definition of a strict constructionist. This memo was never released to the public by the White House on the grounds that it was protected by Executive Privilege. However, the definition given had virtually nothing to do with the concept of strict construction but is a definition of a ideological conservative constructing his own meaning to the Constitution. The source for the text came from John Dean, the Counsel to the President, who found this memo in his White House file and revealed it at a question and answer session at the Commonwealth Club of San Francisco, October 10, 2001.
