Quotes About Due process

1956, the U.S. Supreme Court, in a case known as Bishop v. United States, ruled that the conviction of a mentally incompetent person was a denial of due process. Where doubt exists as to a person's mental competency, the failure to conduct a proper inquiry is a deprivation of his constitutional rights.

In a famous 1963 decision, Brady v. Maryland, the U.S. Supreme Court held that "the suppression by the prosecution of evidence favorable to an accused upon request violates due process where the evidence is material either to guilt or to punishment, irrespective of the good faith or bad faith of the prosecution.

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.

Left-wing zealots have often been prepared to ride roughshod over due process and basic considerations of fairness when they think they can get away with it. For them the ends always seems to justify the means. That is precisely how their predecessors came to create the gulag.

Those who have punished others without a hearing,' they insisted, 'ought not to have the right to be heard themselves.

History has shown us that, on extraordinarily rare occasions, it becomes necessary for the federal government to intervene on behalf of individuals whose 14th Amendment rights to legal due process and equal protection may be violated by a state.

Little wonder that one congressman warned that "government by committees, boards, bureaus, and commissions will, if unchecked and uncontrolled, destroy the republican conception of government"—or that a senator deemed one of the agencies a "star chamber," the arbitrary, juryless court of Stuart despotism, where due process (as first laid out in Magna Carta over 800 years ago and reiterated in the U.S. Constitution's Fifth Amendment) had no place.

In this life and death case, I felt Mrs. Schiavo should receive the fullest due process from our legal system.

The federal government is a ponderous battleship, weighed down by its own armor and slow to change course. But when it chooses to marshal its might against an individual, the government is a lean, mean, conviction machine. Meanwhile, the defendant's lawyer is a loinclothed Roman gladiator protected by a wooden shield, leather shin guards, and prayers to the god Jupiter. The Constitution promises due process but not a fair fight.

Those who do not accept due process, who refuse to acknowledge the democratic mandate, are a cancer on society.

“Does our law convict a man without first hearing from him to determine what he has done?”

For it seems unreasonable to me to send on a prisoner without specifying the charges against him.”