Howard Dean Quotes

No one politician should be allowed to judge the guilt, to charge an individual, to judge the guilt of an individual and to execute an individual.

It must be a judge - never a politician - who decides whether someone is to be locked up.

Judges shall judge justly, according to the written law and not according to their own judgment.

No one should be judge in his own case.

My rule was I will not answer a question that attempts to project how I will rule in a case that might come before the court.

It is more dangerous that even a guilty person should be punished without the forms of law than that he should escape.

It is better to risk saving a guilty man than to condemn an innocent one.

It is better that a guilty man should not be brought to trial than that he should be acquitted.

It is better that ten guilty persons escape than one innocent suffer.

If you hang them all, you will get the guilty. But that's not the American way of doing things.

It is not for the President to determine criminal guilt or render judgment in civil causes. That is the function of the courts. It is not for him to prejudge. I shall do neither; but when facts are revealed to me that require action for the purpose of insuring the enforcement of either civil or criminal liability, such action will be taken. That is the province of the Executive … I feel the public is entitled to know that in the conduct of such action no one is shielded for any party, political or other reason.

It is better to risk sparing a guilty person than to condemn an innocent one.

I don't want to harm my government. I want to help my government. But the fact that they are willing to completely ignore due process, they're willing to declare guilt without ever seeing a trial, these are things that we need to work against as a society and say, 'Hey, this is not appropriate.'

Were I confirmed as a judge, I would decide cases according to the rule of law beginning to end.

People are innocent till proven otherwise. All people are.

We must apply a judicial, not a political, standard to this record. Asking a judicial nominee whose side you will be on in future cases is a political standard.

That it is better 100 guilty Persons should escape than that one innocent Person should suffer, is a Maxim that has been long and generally approved.

An innocent man, if accused, can be acquitted; a guilty man, unless accused, cannot be condemned. It is, however, more advantageous to absolve an innocent than not to prosecute a guilty man.

Is it guilty in here or is it just me?

In any nation in which people's rights have been subordinated to the rights of the few, in any totalitarian nation, the first institution to be dismantled is the jury. I was, I am, afraid.

Why should we tell kidnappers, murderers, and embezzlers their rights? If they don't know their rights, they shouldn't be in the business.

I hate to hear people say this Judge will vote so and so, because he is a Democrat -- and this one so and so because he is a Republican. It is shameful. The Judges have the Constitution for their guidance; they have no right to any politics save the politics of rigid right and justice when they are sitting in judgment upon the great matters that come before them.

There is scarcely anything more important in the government of men than the exact - I will ever say pedantic - observance of the regular forms by which the guilt or innocence of accused persons is determined.

In our criminal justice system, we say it's better for 10 guilty people to go free than for even one innocent person to be wrongly convicted.

Justice is a machine that, when some one has once given it the starting push, rolls on of itself.