Legal System Bias Quotes

There is too much law for those who can afford it and far too little for those who cannot.

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.

Only the rich can get justice, only the poor cannot escape it.

[Robert Downey was being singled out for] selective prosecution. He's a sweet guy who never did harm to anyone except himself. He's been doing drugs for 20 years and functioning for 20 years, and in those 20 years there've been hundreds of people who've been getting high constantly and behaved very destructively and have not been arrested. Robert's real problem is he gets caught.

Mandatory minimum sentencing has disproportionately affected blacks, Hispanics and others who often don't have the financial means to fight back.

Chevron's failure to adhere to basic standards of decency undermines the credibility of our capitalist model and diminishes confidence that our judicial system can serve the poor as well as the rich.

I saw the legal system close up, and I understood that it was built by lawyers for lawyers, and unless you have an attorney to navigate it, you're not going to be successful.

And Justice for Some

It is tempting to pretend that minorities on death row share a fate in no way connected to our own, that our treatment of them sounds no echoes beyond the chambers in which they die. Such an illusion is ultimately corrosive, for the reverberations of injustice are not so easily confined.