Quotes About Rights

The courts are using the First Amendment to attack religion, when they should be using it to protect religion.

Have the wild things no moral or legal rights? What right has man to inflict such long and fearful agony on a fellow creature, simply because that creature does not speak his language?

Carry out the republican principle of universal suffrage, or strike it from your banners and substitute 'Freedom and Power to one half of society, and Submission and Slavery to the other.'

It is high time to compel man by the might of right to give woman her political, legal and social rights. She will find her own sphere in accordance with her capacities, powers and tastes and yet she will be woman still.

Fourth Amendment, which requires a judge-issued warrant for an arrest; the Fifth Amendment, which requires a grand jury indictment before a person is held for trial; and the Sixth Amendment, which says that a person can be imprisoned only after conviction by a jury based on proof beyond a reasonable doubt.

Erwin Chemerinsky

In 1977 Justice William Brennan wrote a famous article, published in the Harvard Law Review, that encouraged the use of state constitutions to protect constitutional rights.52 State constitutions, he argued, "are a font of individual liberties.

States can provide more protection of rights under their constitutions than exists under the U.S. Constitution. To take a simple example, the Supreme Court has held that citizens have no First Amendment right to use privately owned shopping centers for speech purposes.57 But the California Supreme Court interpreted the state constitution to create a right in the state to use shopping centers for expression. The Supreme Court upheld this interpretation as permissible.

The Fourth Amendment protects people, not property, the Court stressed. A person's Fourth Amendment rights do not depend on where he or she is at the time of the government intrusion, nor on whether a physical trespass occurs.

Massiah v. Illinois, the Court held that without the presence of a lawyer, the police may not attempt to deliberately elicit statements from a person who has been indicted.6 That same year the Court went further and, in Escobedo v. Illinois, held that even before there is an indictment, criminal defendants have the right to have an attorney present while police are questioning them in custody.7

if a person invokes the right to remain silent, all questioning must cease. If a person asks for a lawyer, questioning must end until one is provided

Berghuis, the Court ruled that the same is true of the right to remain silent. Simply put, a person is not protected by the right to remain silent unless he or she knows to say and actually says something as explicit as "I wish to assert my right to remain silent.

suspects waive their Miranda rights in 83.7 percent of interrogations.28 A national study came to a similar conclusion and found that 81 percent of all suspects waived their rights.

The Supreme Court, though, found that conducting the lineup without the presence of a lawyer violated Wade's right to counsel.

post-indictment lineup is a critical stage of the proceeding and that a criminal defendant has as much right to an attorney there as at the trial itself.

legislation was passed to afford a federal right in federal courts because, by reason of prejudice, passion, neglect, intolerance, or otherwise," states were likely to violate constitutional rights, and hence a federal forum was needed to enforce the Constitution.4

The Court explicitly rejected the argument that the government had to show that the consent to a search had to involve a person's "knowing" waiver of his or her rights.

But why not, especially since the usual test for a waiver of one's rights is whether it is knowing as well as voluntary? Justice Stewart, writing for the Court, said candidly that that would make it too hard for police to conduct searches. He said that two competing concerns had to be balanced: law enforcement's need to perform such searches and the desire to prevent coercion.

In every case since then, without exception, the Court has rejected people's ability to sue federal officers.

Smith v. Maryland, it held that police can obtain a list of phone numbers that a person calls, or receives calls from, without needing to get a warrant or have probable cause.

Erwin Chemerinsky

First, it has narrowed the scope of rights that people have when dealing with the police. If there is no constitutional limit to police power, and politically imposed limits are absent, then police can do whatever they want. Overall, the Court has interpreted protections against unreasonable searches and arrests narrowly, compelled self-incrimination, and accepted faulty identification procedures.

Only during the Warren Court era, from 1953 to 1969, did the Court, for the first time, significantly expand the rights of criminal suspects and attempt to provide protection against illegal searches and arrests, coerced confessions, and suggestive police identification procedures. In addition, the Court greatly expanded the two remedies

Neither the text of the Constitution nor the Framers' intent supports these rulings. Instead, we must regard the Court's decisions as a consistent choice, throughout American history, to favor the interests of law enforcement over the rights of individuals and to ignore the enormous racism that has infected policing since the nation's first days.