Legal Disparity Quotes

If I rob a gas station, I'm going to get 15 years. If I steal $400 million on Wall Street, I start plea-bargaining.

Defendants are being evaluated based on numerical grid without any aggravating circumstances being considered. The effect has been to transfer the disparity from the judge to the prosecutor allowing for a great deal of leeway on indictments.

The more advanced nations have laws recognizing the sanctity of property and the protection of person, but international laws and ethics have not kept pace with intra-national laws and ethics.

Law is a silvery web that lets the big flies pass and catches all the small ones.

We have a system of justice in [the US] that treats you much better if you're rich and guilty than if you're poor and innocent. Wealth, not culpability, shapes outcomes.

If you're injured in an automobile accident, and you sue the driver, you get much more for your injury than if you're fighting for your country. There's a double standard here.

We have the heaviest concentration of lawyers on Earth—one for every five-hundred Americans; three times as many as are in England, four times as many as are in West Germany, twenty-one times as many as there are in Japan. We have more litigation, but I am not sure that we have more justice. No resources of talent and training in our own society, even including the medical care, is more wastefully or unfairly distributed than legal skills. Ninety percent of our lawyers serve 10 percent of our people. We are over-lawyered and under-represented.

When New York State decriminalized abortion in 1970 and thousands of well-off women started traveling there to obtain safe abortions while their disadvantaged sisters continued to risk death at home, the inherent unfairness of a legal patchwork was thrown into bold relief

You know, if you’re caught with an ounce of cocaine, the chances are good you’re going to go to jail. If it happens repeatedly, you may go to jail for the rest of your life. But evidently, if you launder nearly a billion dollars for drug cartels and violate our international sanctions, your company pays a fine and you go home and sleep in your own bed at night, every single individual associated with this. I think that’s fundamentally wrong.

I am fed up with a system which busts the pot smoker and lets the big dope racketeer go free.

These people have served a longer sentence than some people who have committed murder.

You can't say 'because we decide we're different then we need a different set of laws.'

We do many things at the federal level that would be considered dishonest and illegal if done in the private sector.

Guys with bigger boobs than I have walk around, and they're fine. If women were to do that, they could go to jail. That's totally wrong.

If there are rights or duties of people which are not guaranteed because they're part of a [de facto] union and not of a family, there will be the need of a legislative action to remove the disparity. Obviously, when talking about people I refer to everyone [including homosexuals].

Marijuana gives rise to insanity -- not in its users but in the policies directed against it. A nation that sentences the possessor of a single joint to life imprisonment without parole but sets a murderer free after perhaps six years is in the grips of a deep psychosis.

It's very clear that we are going to have 10 different [abortion] laws and that we are going to have these laws made by judges

In fact, the legal system is in part responsible for their very size and growth. And too often when the individual finds himself in conflict with these forces, the legal system sides with the giant institution, not the small businessman or private citizen.

Do we operate under a system of equal justice under law? Or is there one system for the average citizen and another for the high and mighty?

Tenants don't have any right to court-appointed attorneys in civil court, so they're either facing their landlord - or his or her attorney - alone, or they just don't show up. That reflects a severe power imbalance.

I'm honestly perplexed about the distinction represented by the cervical wall. On one side, people should be prosecuted if they do anything to harm the fetus, but once on the outside, sorry kid, whatever happens happens. You're on your own.

I spent 23 days in jail—two days longer than a man who killed his wife.

An overzealous prosecutor ….an underpaid, inexperienced defense attorney

Chelsea Manning got thirty-five years in prison, while I'm still free.

People who make off with large sums of money escape justice or get insignificant sentences, while the thief who steals a handbag … gets six years…. In the United States, Nixon quit for far less.