Legal Safeguards Quotes

When I signed on to letting the death penalty back in, I thought the procedural protections against executing an innocent person were stronger than they turned out to be.

… so as not to hazard the Constitution.

The [constitutional] safeguards of "due process of law" and "the equal protection of the laws" summarize the history of freedom of English-speaking peoples running back to Magna Carta and reflected in the constitutional development of our people.

The spirit of the times may alter, will alter. Our rulers will become corrupt, our people careless. A single zealot may commence persecutor, and better men be his victims. It can never be too often repeated that the time for fixing every essential right on a legal basis is while our rulers are honest and ourselves united.

Law is the safest helmet.

[Liberty] considers religion as the safeguard of morality, and morality as the best security of law and the surest pledge of the duration of freedom.

Laws provide, as much as ispossible that the goods and health of subjects be not injured by the fraud and violence of others. They do not guard them from thenegligence or ill-husbandry of the possessors themselves.

Trial by jury, the best of all safeguards for the person, the property, and the fame of every individual.

The law exists to protect the weak from the strong.

If the prosecution of crime is to be conducted with so little regard for that protection which centuries of English law have given to the individual, we are indeed at the dawn of a new era; and much that we have deemed vital to our liberties, is a delusion.

The safeguards of liberty have frequently been forged in cases involving not very nice people.

If one man can be allowed to determine for himself what is law, every man can. That means first chaos, then tyranny. Legal process is an essential part of the democratic process.

The United States compared to a number of our competitors is the only government in the world with any kind of safeguards, any kind of checks and balances. They may in many respects need to be strengthened and people need to be reassured, and they need to have their protections embodied in law.

In lieu of those checks and balances central to our legal system, non-citizens face an executive that is now investigator, prosecutor, judge, jury and jailer or executioner. In an Orwellian twist, Bush's order calls this Soviet-style abomination 'a full and fair trial.'

The prohibitions of the Constitution were put in place precisely to prevent majority opinion from ruling certain areas of life.

The notion that a person's constitutional rights may be subject to a majority vote is itself anathema.

The moment I decided to blow the whistle on a lot of the corruption going on in the White House, there are protections that are afforded to me.

Due process is a growth too sturdy to succumb to the infection of the least ingredient of error.

The abhorrence of society to the use of involuntary confessions does not turn alone on their inherent untrustworthiness. It also turns on the deep-rooted feeling that the police must obey the law while enforcing the law; that, in the end, life and liberty can be as much endangered from illegal methods used to convict those thought to be criminals as from the actual criminals themselves.

The critical point is that the Constitution places the right of silence beyond the reach of government.

Any new legal measures, or cooperative arrangements between government and companies meant to keep people from organizing violence or criminal actions, must not be carried out in ways that erode due process, rule of law and the protection of innocent citizens' political and civil rights.

The law is the only sure protection of the weak, and the only efficient restraint upon the strong.

You’ve got to have safeguards [on law enforcement authorities] if we’re going to continue to have the freedom we’ve had for the past 200 years.

And it is no less true, that personal security and private property rest entirely upon the wisdom, the stability, and the integrity of the courts of justice.

l believe that if we were to legalize voluntary euthanasia then, no matter how tightly the law was framed, in ten years time no Granny would be safe.