District Attorneys, Assistant District Attornies Quotes

This is the 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.

She was being questioned by a reporter about the many women who had reported that the Alabama politician Roy Moore had accosted them when they were minors and he was in his 30s and the District Attorney. 3 weeks after she made this statement about Judge Moore who was running for the Senate, her father Donald Trump endorsed Moore strongly and even recorded Robocalls which want thought the state urging the selection of the man his daughter wanted to be in a "special place in Hell."

The “third degree” was widely used by police throughout the nation. It was in relatively progressive New York City that the practice was first widely investigate, exposed and curtailed. Most of the country followed suit, but unfortunately, the practice still exists, but is much less common than in the 1930s.

He had been fired by the George W. Bush White House because he would not rush an indictment against a democratic politician to make the newspapers before the election that year. Unfortunately, many prosecutors will file a questionable case without sufficient evidence for a conviction. They get the newspaper headlines and TV coverage when they file the indictment, and little negative press when they person is found not guilty months or years later. The best prosecutors never will allow politics to influence their prosecution decisions, but there are still many who do.

While the racial incidents of Jena became a national cause célèbre, the quotation is memorable because it illustrated the huge de facto power that even a small town district attorney has. Though most do not abuse it, some do, and few Das threaten the way that Walters did. The reality is that simply by determining the charge, the DA is capable of incredible consequences on people’s lives. In the Jena situation, Walters had charged Black juveniles with “Attempted Second Degree Murder” for engaging in a fight with white juveniles. The penalty was from 50 to 100 years without any possibility of parole. A white student who had assaulted a Black was only charged with “Battery” a minor crime. Jena became the location of national civil rights protests.

Watkins was the first Dallas County Black DA. He was being interviewed because DNA testing proved that a man who had served 30 years in prison for rape and robbery, could not have committed the crime, and he had just been released. Watkins quotation was very significant because it set forth a philosophy that while extant in other areas of the country is almost unheard of in Texas, where there have been more innocent men convicted than in any other state. DAs in Texas usually fight every attempt to examine old evidence with modern tools.

This quotation is famous for illustrating the kind of prejudicial statements which were then allowed by prosecutors to inflame a jury and the public in general. What this prosecutor was claiming was that these to defendants should be put to death, not only because of the nature of their crime but that they didn’t believe in God, and read the works of a German Philosopher. This was one of the most famous and covered cases in the Nation and the defendants were represented by the great attorney Clarence Darrow. Yet the allegation that Leopold and Loeb were both atheists which was never proved and was irrelevant anyway. Crowe also told the jury and the public that they were followers of Nietzsche a German Philosopher and made that seem somehow evil. He counted on the vestige of anti German prejudice from the First World War which had recently ended. The defendants were highly educated young men who had books of most philosophers. They had killed another youth under very strange psychological circumstances and the entire trial was about whether they should get the death sentence.

Comey was objecting to the firing of several Assistant Attorneys General whom he thought were victims of parisanship.