Quotes About Trial

Gardeners learn by trowel and error.

The penalty for laughing in a courtroom is six months in jail; if it were not for this penalty, the jury would never hear the evidence.

You will find out who you are when the difficult moment comes.

Everyone's a believer when things are going fine. The real faith is when one becomes patient with tribulations.

If Milosevic is to be tried, he has to be tried by a proper court, an impartial, properly constituted court which has international respect.

As psychiatrist Donald Lunde puts it in his classic book Murder and Madness, the purpose of an insanity trial is to "separate the mad from the bad." American juries, however, as Lunde also points out, are often reluctant "to believe that someone who kills is mad rather than bad. In fact, many people suspect that the insanity defense is a ruse employed by clever lawyers in collaboration with naive psychiatrists to win an acquittal of an obviously guilty client.

For the most part, winning an acquittal with an insanity plea is so difficult that few defense lawyers attempt it. In the last hundred years, barely one percent of all felons brought to trial in this country have resorted to this tactic. And of that tiny minority, only one in three has been found NGRI ("not guilty by reason of insanity").

As for serial killers, "Only 3.6 percent have been declared incompetent for trial or cleared by reason of insanity," according to one expert. Even a severely delusional psychotic like Herbert Mullin—who believed he could ward off an apocalyptic earthquake by slaughtering strangers—was deemed "sane by legal standards" and convicted of murder.

Owing, among other factors, to the exceedingly slow working of the lunacy commission, Bob's trial was postponed until the fall of 1938. By then the city had a new district attorney: Thomas E. Dewey, the fearless young "gangbuster" whose relentless crusade against racketeers like Dutch Schultz and Lucky Luciano would propel him to the governor's mansion in Albany and two runs for the White House as the Republican presidential candidate in 1944 and 1948.

for, so well is the harp of human feeling strung, that nothing but a crash that breaks every string can wholly mar its harmony; and, on looking back to seasons which in review appear to us as those of deprivation and trial, we can remember that each hour, as it glided, brought its diversions and alleviations, so that, though not happy wholly, we were not, either, wholly miserable.

She had not eaten supper and remembered the chicken and salad and wondered where Ervin was and imagined him in a nice restaurant, being pleasant with the waitress in a very low-key way, letting on nothing, a felon in flight, a murderer of possibilities, a their of happiness, a man guilty of so much, yet never standing trial for anything.

One of the most disturbing facts that came out in the Eichmann trial was that a psychiatrist examined him and pronounced him perfectly sane. I do not doubt it at all, and that is precisely why I find it disturbing. If all the Nazis had been psychotics . . . their appalling cruelty would have been in some sense easier to understand. Thomas Merton, Reflections

That same year, in an interview with the New Yorker, Kelley continued his dismissal of the "mad Nazi" thesis: "With the exception of Dr. Ley, there wasn't an insane Joe in the crowd. That's what makes this trial important—there are twenty-one ruthless people with counterparts all over the world, none of them sufficiently deviate to be locked up by society under normal conditions.

Here and there, human nature may be great in times of trial, but generally speaking it is its weakness and not its strength that appears in a sick chamber; it is selfishness and impatience rather than generosity and fortitude, that one hears of. There is so little real friendship in the world! – and unfortunately' (speaking low and tremulously) 'there are so many who forget to think seriously till it is almost too late.

Here and there, human nature may be great in times of trial; but generally speaking, it is its weakness and not its strength that appears in a sick chamber: it is selfishness and impatience rather than generosity and fortitude, that one hears of.

Trials are won by attorneys whose stories fit, and lost by those whose stories are like the shapeless housecoat that truth, in her disdain of appearances, has chosen as her uniform.

No one knows what's a good idea or a bad idea until you try it.

You're innocent until proven guilty.

Coding, it's an endless process of trial and error, of trying to get the right command in the right place, with sometimes just a semicolon making the difference between success and failure. Code breaks and then it falls apart, and it often takes many, many tries until that magical moment when what you're trying to build comes to life.

Ye have brought this man unto me, as one that perverteth the people; and behold, I, having examined him before you, have found no fault in this man touching those things whereof ye accuse him.

I've had ups and downs with my skin, but after some time, I've learned what works best and what products I need to stay away from.

I was very upset because I did not have a fair trial to prove my loyalty to this country.

Of course, this is a heuristic, which is a fancy way of saying that it doesn't work.

All progress is experimental.