Criminal Sentencing Quotes

Some of the people on death row today might not be there if the courts had not been so lenient on them when they were first offenders.

Hang him, swaggering rascal!

A lot can be debated about criminal justice and its delivery system.

But the single overwhelming reason why jails are bursting is longer sentences given for more crimes.

You can put a murderer in a suit, and hes still a murderer.

It was only his fifth offense, and this time he's killed someone.

A man convicted of murder is twenty times more likely than a woman convicted of murder to receive the death penalty. Since the 1976 reinstatement of the death penalty, 120 men and only 1 woman have actually been executed. The woman, from North Carolina, said she preferred to be executed. In North Carolina, a man who commits second-degree murder receives a sentence on average of 12.6 years longer than a woman who commits second-degree murder.

We're releasing hardened criminals from jails all over California. They don't have the money. They don't have the room anymore. The jails are overflowing so we gotta get rid of somebody.

We need to look at the totality of the things that we're labeling as violent and really examine whether we need to have some more proportionality in terms of the punishment fitting the crime that's done. The bright line that we have right now, between violent and nonviolent, does not account for shades of gray.

I want to stop piling people into prisons and stop branding people with a felony for a personal weakness.

The average prison term for a convicted murderer in America is 6.5 years. The average tenure for a member of Congress is 13 years. We've got it backwards. We are giving early release to the wrong criminal class.

A Pennsylvania woman convicted for shoplifting was sentenced to wear a badge that reads "Convicted Shoplifter." However, her lawyers hope to plea bargain down to a bumper sticker reading "I'd Rather Be Stealing!.

The newest "fad" of the penologists is "indeterminate sentences".... This plan ... will work first rate if God will agree to act as the discharging officer. It is hardly likely, though, that he would accept the position: he has long been out of politics.

I think, the left makes a mistake. If you look particularly at the state levels, violent repeat criminals are not punished enough. The average murderer is sentenced to 17 1/2 years but serves six. The average rapist is sentenced to 10 years but serves about three and a half. The average mugger is sentenced to five years and serves little more than one.

I agree with President Obama and Attorney General Holder that we need to reform our criminal sentencing laws.

Changes in court decisions [on defendants' rights] ... have about the same effect on the crime rate as an aspirin would have on a tumor of the brain.

Eliminating the death penalty...will not hinder the prosecutorial capacity to seek, or the court's ability to impose, 'life without parole' sentences for serious, heinous crimes and criminals.

I don't think anybody's ever notified that they were sentenced to an extra two years because their recidivism score had been high, or notified that this beat cop happened to be in their neighborhood checking people's pockets for pot because of a predictive policing algorithm. That's just not how it works.

There is two types of Larceny, Petty and Grand. They are supposed to be the same in the eyes of the law, but judges always put a little extra on you for Petty, which is kind of a fine for stupidness.

Sometimes, we get numb to the fact that people get sent away. We don't see where they are; we say they are 'doing time,' and you really don't know what that is.

In the case of a man and a woman [accused of commiting a crime together], both will often agree to the man taking the rap despite the man being more likely to receive a longer sentence and more likely to be raped in prison. If blacks were agreeing to do that for whites, the black community would be smart enough to call that 'learned subservience.'

We need to deport these criminals and negotiate agreements requiring that they do their time in their own countries.

The broad consensus is that our system should be better structured to deter crimes without giving up on everyone who commits them, and should better balance resources to hold violent criminals fully accountable without imposing unnecessarily harsh sentences on nonviolent offenders.

If you're stealing a television, that should not be the death penalty.

Liberals are people who think that being tough on crime means longer suspended sentences.