Inequality in the Justice System Quotes

I start out with the assumption that a lawyer in a criminal case is going to be incompetent - substantially so. I find my assumption to be rarely wrong. Yet society starts out with the very opposite assumption.

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.

Years now, decades, of visiting my parents behind bars taught me hard lessons about how broken the criminal justice system is - about how devoid of compassion it is. It's not healing the harm that victims experience. It's not rehabilitating people. And in many ways, it's making us less safe.

Every celebrity case I've been involved in - I've been involved in a great many - the one thing you can be sure of is they don't get the same justice as everybody else. It could be worse, it could be better, it's never the same.

There are far too many people in prison with poorly understood disability, particularly cognitive and mental disabilities. We cannot tolerate a system that just processes people rather than a system that fairly administers justice.

The entire legal system was built upon the assumption that people would have adequate representation. When they don't, the system fails, and the laws don't matter.

The United States has the highest incarceration rate in the world. Many of those people deserve to be in prison; however, some of them do not.

I've had a Japanese judge, a Mexican judge in the past, and they have done some ridiculous scoring.

Thousands of citizens are confined each year, not because they are guilty of commission of a crime, but because they cannot afford to post bond.

When you have a death row case, you have to make 100 percent sure you have the right person. But these DAs in the state of Alabama are racist.

I think there are too many people in jail for too long and for not necessarily good reasons.