Quotes About Crime

As crime writers, we put these characters, year after year, book after book, through the most horrendous trauma, dealing with grief and death and loss and violence. We can't pretend that these things don't affect these characters; they have to. If they don't, then you're essentially writing cartoons.

These illegal aliens are criminals and we need to treat them as such. I'm not in favor of giving amnesty to anybody who has broken the law. I applaud what our Georgia legislature is doing in trying to crack down on this situation.

I have no favourite genre or style but treat each novel with the same care, imagination and craftsmanship. It's as difficult to write a crime or a children's novel with a touch of style and grace as it is a literary novel.

In a crime story, the details become tremendously important - where the staircase was in relation to the bed, for example.

A defendant on trial for a specific crime is entitled to his day in court, not in a stadium or a city or nationwide arena.

The central pillar of our justice system is due process. You have got to be charged with a crime. Then you can challenge those charges in a court of law with a trial.

Under the dual sovereignty principle, the Fifth Amendment's prohibition on double jeopardy - which prevents the government from trying someone twice for the same crime - doesn't apply if the second trial is by a different 'sovereign' - in this case, the state.

'Avatar' imaginatively revisits the crime scene of white America's foundational act of genocide, in which entire native tribes and civilizations were wiped out by European immigrants to the American continent.

A few hours after the news broke about the death of crime writer Donald E. Westlake, a newspaper asked me to write a tribute. In short order I did so, calling attention to his decades-long career, both under his own name and that of his primary alter ego, Richard Stark, who introduced the unsentimental antihero-heister Parker to the literary canon.

Forget not that the grossest crime is to compromise with injustice and wrong. Remember the eternal law: you must give, if you want to get.

The poor must be wisely visited and liberally cared for, so that mendicity shall not be tempted into mendacity, nor want exasperated into crime.

As long as there are guns, the individual that wants a gun for a crime is going to have one and going to get it.

They [the Reagan Administration] want to put street criminals in jail to make life safer for the business criminals. They're against street crime, providing that street isn't Wall Street.

Liebert and his team added that an offender so slick and bold and self-assured probably was practiced in committing this sort of crime and that he did so compulsively. He'd killed before and would want to kill again. There also was a good chance that he was a necrophile. If we ever found the victims, they likely would have been mutilated or dismembered.

The crime was a felony punishable by death, which could be avoided by three years of impressment on an American ship of war.

Don't the Conservatives know that Jesus was soft on crime?

The last person to be hanged in Glasgow at the age of 31 was a beast by the name of Peter Thomas Anthony Manuel, he swung from the gallows in Barlinnie Prison on 11 July 1958.

Just as chillingly as Manuel took police to the spot where he had buried 17-year-old Isabella Cooke, it was reminiscent of this when Brady took police to Saddleworth Moor in Yorkshire, when he and Hindley were flown there by helicopter to walk on the graves of more victims.

Ian Brady was born Ian Duncan Stewart on 2 January 1938 in Glasgow, Scotland, he's responsible for a series of murders that took place from 1962 until 1965 in Greater Manchester. Brady and Myra Hindley met in 1961, she was a 19-year-old typist, he was a 23-year-old stock clerk. By 1966, both were tried at Chester Assizes for multiple murder. The trial lasted 15 days; Brady and Hindley were convicted on 6 May 1966, sentenced to life imprisonment.

Gary Moore is another legendary figure of sheer violence. In prison, Gary has spent most of his adult life inside one jail or another. When, on the odd occasion, he does get out of prison, it doesn't take him long to go on a murderous campaign of total terror. Gary has been charged and stood trial for some three or four different murders.

They think giving people longer prison sentences is going to teach people a lesson. Well that is just fantasy, as we just take our drugs and violence in to the prison. Our brothers and sisters, pals or rivals outside plug the gap that has been left by the dealer that was selling the crack or smack in the first place. Just like kamikazes, when one is dead, fifty queue up to take their place.

Rose West was starting 10 life sentences with no prospect of ever being released, Fred West had gone to hell, I had got my life back and the media circus had moved on to the next big scoop.

The rush I got from crime was better than that of glue, drink or hash. I loved playing cat and mouse with the local coppers. He Who Dares Wins, the SAS motto, was very applicable to my life then.

Once the cons were in the cell, they'd pull razors or homemade daggers out and rob the YOs of their trainers, leather jackets or jewellery. You couldn't placate them; it would be akin to expecting not to be bitten from a Rhodesian Ridgeback whilst petting it! Bar L was full of rough, colourful and out-of-control junkies who wouldn't think twice about stabbing you or slashing you just to get what you had on your feet to pay for their next hit of smack.