Quotes About Justice

A jury could only declare my son 'not guilty', never 'innocent'.

Here is the dirty little secret: the error rate in criminal verdicts is much higher than anyone imagines.

crime stories I never fully appreciated until I became one: it is so ruinously expensive to mount a defense that, innocent or guilty, the accusation is itself a devastating punishment. Every defendant pays a price.

I did not usually feel that sort of passion about any case, but I disliked this murderer already. For murdering, yes, but also for fucking with us. For refusing to submit.

A liberal, it turns out, is a conservative who's been indicted.

Every criminal is still a man, a complex of good and bad, fully deserving of our empathy and mercy.

Somebody stitched three holes in a line across that boy's chest and left nothing to indicate who or why.

Free will is as important to the law as it is to religion or any other code of morality. We do not punish the leopard for its wildness.

The towering lie of the criminal justice system—that we can reliably determine the truth, that we can know "beyond a reasonable doubt" who is guilty and who is not—is built on this whopper of an admission: after a thousand years or so of refining the process, judges and lawyers are no more able to say what is true than a dozen knuckleheads selected at random off the street.

But then, we all tell ourselves stories about ourselves. The money man tells himself that by getting rich he is actually enriching others, the artist tells himself that his creations are things of deathless beauty, the soldier tells himself he is on the side of the angels. Me, I told myself that in court I could make things turn out right—that when I won, justice was served. You can get drunk on such thinking, and in Jacob's case I was.

understood that the actual reason courtrooms often have no windows is to prevent the parties from heaving lawyers out of them.

In court, the thing we punish is the criminal intention. -the mens rea, the guilty mind. There is an ancient rule: actus non facit reum nisi mens sit rea - "the act does not create guilt unless the mind is also guilty." That is why we do not convict children, drunks, and schizophrenics: they are incapable of deciding to commit their crimes with a true understanding of the significance of their actions. Free will is as important to the law as it is to religion or any other code of morality.

there are wounds worse than fatal, which the law's little binary distinctions—guilty/innocent, criminal/victim—cannot fathom, let alone fix. The law is a hammer, not a scalpel.

liberal, it turns out, is a conservative who's been indicted.

He was just innocent. With the best intentions, he smashed people's lives and never lost a minute of sleep over it. He only went after bad guys, after all. That

Grand juries serve for months, and they figure out pretty quickly what the gig is all about: accuse, point your finger, name the wicked one. A

actus non facit reum nisi mens sit rea—"the act does not create guilt unless the mind is also guilty.

I wouldn't have gone to the trouble of hurting him if I was going to kill him

Remember, the surest way to lose your rights is to take them for granted.

choke him. They filled him with their trial and

With all the world's uncertainties and injustices, with all the doubt that piles around us like dead leaves in an autumn storm, you remain so sure of your truths. It must be comforting to be so sure.

The cause of Freedom is the cause of God!

Let Southern oppressors tremble—let their secret abettors tremble—let their Northern apologists tremble—let all the enemies of the persecuted blacks tremble.

Are right and wrong convertible terms, dependent upon popular opinion?