Lance Armstrong Quotes
If I can't face my accusers, that's a joke. We did that in medieval times.
Armstrong, Lance. Interview. CNN, 2012.
Prosecutors, even ones who are frequent lawbreakers themselves violating defendant's rights or illegally manipulating trials, are reluctant to be officially found to have done so. Many politicians start their political careers as prosecutors and then rise to higher office. If it is officially found that they had abused a defendant and violated the law, it can be detrimental to their careers. So in many states, they have placed barriers making it much harder for an improperly convicted person to even get a court hearing. The cost to society however is that they are never accountable, and people have been wrongly imprisoned and cannot even get a hearing to prove that they were the victims of official misconduct. The rationale for these rules that prevent victims from obtaining fairness and justice is finality—the concept that there should be some end to the process of appeals so justice can be said to have been done. It prevents a kind of closure for many of the victims of crimes and their families if the guilty perpetrator is constantly appealing or can do so.
There are many who believe that this principle should operate today in America. We do not allow civil recovery from an errant or unscrupulous judge as there could be a very inhibiting factor on the willingness to serve. However the Visigoths, weighted down with religious and secular superstition still placed fairness as one of the most important elements of their legal system. This is the most formalized and sophisticated compendium of laws of the so-called “barbaric peoples” of Europe. The compilation was in many ways a documentation of the traditional laws of the Visigoths that had evolved over hundreds of years.
This quotation shows that “due process” was an important principle for the colonists long before the American Revolution and the Constitution and Bill of Rights. Rights. Connecticut and New York passed similar laws after Massachusetts.
Americans are divided as to whether this should be encouraged and helped or not.
Lance Edward Armstrong (born September 18, 1971)is an American former professional road racing cyclist. Regarded as a sports icon for winning the Tour de France seven consecutive times from 1999 to 2005 after recovering from testicular cancer, he was later stripped of all his titles when an investigation found that he had used performance-enhancing drugs over his career.
