Quotes About Justice

We found out later that a lone Black juror had refused to convict us. He had heard us.

Since i was the only Black woman sitting in the defendant's chair, of course he identified me. We protested the procedure, but the judge admitted his testimony anyway. We finally did arrange for a lineup, and, of course, the other so-called witnesses picked out another woman.

Prisons are a profitable business. They are a way of legally perpetuating slavery.

I think I would not hold one in slavery at any rate, yet the point is not clear enough for me to denounce people upon.

To avoid being manhandled, as soon as the judge said, "Remove the defendant from the courtroom," i would say, "The defendant will remove herself." Most of the time it worked, but one day the marshals were so gung ho they jumped on me and started brutalizing me in open kourt.

were alive and we were excited and we believed that we were going to be free someday.

The trial began on January 17, 1977, the same day Gary Gilmore was shot in Utah. Gary Gilmore was the first person legally executed since the death penalty was struck down by the u.s. supreme kourt in the early 1970s. His execution set the climate for the trial.

Even though the National Jury Project had done a study of Middlesex County and had found that eighty-three percent of the people had heard about my case in the media and seventy percent had already formulated an opinion about my guilt, the kourt maintained that i could receive a fair trial.

I decided on Assata Olugbala Shakur. Assata means "She who struggles," Olugbala means "Love for the people," and i took the name Shakur out of respect for Zayd and Zayd's family. Shakur means "the thankful.

Anytime you're talking about a ladder, you're talking about a top and a bottom, an upper class and a lower class, a rich class and a poor class. As long as you've got a system with a top and a bottom, Black people are always going to wind up at the bottom, because we are the easiest to discriminate against. That's why i couldn't see fighting within the system.

Acquittal. The kourtroom broke into a loud cheer. The judge just gave up calling for order. He had to wait for the shouting to die down. It was a long time coming. All the spectators were jumping around hugging each other. The marshals led me out of the courtroom and handcuffed me. They brought me back to Rikers Island where i was put into solitary confinement.

Just because you believe in self-defense doesn't mean you let yourself be sucked into defending yourself on the enemy's terms.

To win we have got to wear down our oppressors, little by little, and at the same time, strengthen our forces, slowly but surely.

Any community seriously concerned with its own freedom has to be concerned about other peoples' freedom as well. The victory of oppressed people anywhere in the world is a victory for Black people. Each time one of imperialism's tentacles is cut off we are closer to liberation.

The capper came when the manager of the bank came forward to testify in my behalf. He said that i was definitely not the woman who robbed the bank and that the robber was a different height and weight from mine.

Judge Bachman

he was the same judge who had just given Mitchell and Stans, the Watergate defendants, who did not have one fraction of the valid reasons for an adjournment that we had, an extended postponement.

Jury selection continued with only the judge and the prosecutor participating.

The defense team's headquarters, located in New Brunswick, was broken into, papers rummaged through and stolen, and the judge refused to investigate, calling the motion "frivolous.

the questions we submitted and others that the prosecutor submitted. After we went through the answers we were to pick or eliminate jurors, asking additional questions as needed. Some of the answers were so contradictory and such a study on the level of racism in amerika that it would take a book just to report on them. In one hundred percent of the cases we were able to tell whether the prospective juror was Black, white, or "other," just by reading the answers.

Anyone who goes to law puts himself in the hands of an unscrupulous ring of bandits and thugs who milk both parties as hard as they can until one of them has to pay. If one allows for the stupidity and prejudice of judges, conceit and idleness of barristers, and diffuseness of English law, neither side can have a more certain chance of winning a legal action than on a tossed coin, which is a much cheaper way of settling things.

Perhaps it is the knowledge that we carry in our hearts that nobody ultimately wins. Somewhere we all go down. Force used tyrannically is our common enemy. Why align ourselves with it in whatever shape or fashion.

I am not free while any woman is unfree, even when her shackles are very different from my own.

I done learned my mistake and learned to do what's right by it. You still trying to get something for nothing. Life don't owe you nothing. You owe it to yourself. - Troy -