Quotes about Judicial Errors

Antonin Scalia

Like other human institutions, courts and juries are not perfect. One cannot have a system of criminal punishment without accepting the possibility that someone will be punished mistakenly.

Tom Price

Society is now less convinced of the absolute accuracy of the criminal justice system.

Michael Baden

I don't have any personal upset at the death penalty as an abstraction, What I do realize is how many mistakes can be made with the way things are being done now.

Sam Sheppard

I therefore believe that our system does not have a word for failed trial, and that is where the American public does not realize that our criminal justice system sometimes makes mistakes.

Ramsey Clark

Our history shows that the death penalty has been unjustly imposed, innocents have been killed by the state, effective rehabilitation has been impaired, judicial administration has suffered. It is the poor, the sick, the ignorant, the powerless, and the hated who are executed.

John Winthrop

It is not hard to prove, that the lawmakers, in all states, have committed more, and more pernicious errors than the judges

Rand Paul

Many states and even many people who are in support of the death penalty question their support of the death penalty because of the imperfection of our courts. Through DNA testing, we don't always get it right, even with that.

George Ryan

I don’t see how the Justice Department thinks they have a system that works when 50 percent of the [appeals] cases get sent back for fixing…. How does that happen? How in God’s name does that happen? Here in America. How many more cases of wrongful conviction before we can agree that the system … is broken.

William Rehnquist

No amount of repetition of historical errors in judicial opinions can make the errors true.

Relying on precedent in judicial decisions has the potential problem of perpetuating errors of the past. However, not to do so, creates doubt and uncertainty vitiating one of the major functions of the higher courts---to set the rules for all. In this particular case, the other justices did not agree that there had been a previous error and so Rehnquist’s view was a minority dissent, almost all judges would agree with this principle.

Rick Santorum

I don't advocate civil disobedience. I do advocate the role of an informed citizen to try to overturn when a court makes a mistake and gets an issue wrong.

Dick Cheney

I'm more concerned with bad guys who got out and released than I am with a few that in fact were innocent.

James Toback

The idea that there aren't mistakes made constantly in the judicial system is too obvious even to need to mention.

Judicial Errors Quotes