Mishnah Quotes
Justice delayed has the same consequences as justice denied.
The Mishnah was the first written codification of ancient Jewish laws and interpretations. The Books of Moses--the first 5 Books of the Old Testament was the fundamental law--God's law. The Mishnah was a combintion of administative and policy manuals and judicial precedents.
Mishnah, Avot 5:8
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
There is a constant tension between swift justice and due process. Some say that “justice delayed is justice denied” but at the same time the worst injustice is to rush to judgment and convict the wrong person or fail to convict the perpetrator because the prosecution was insufficiently prepared. Both are major problems of our criminal justice system.
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.
Jacques Anatole Francois Thibault
Attila the Hun
Mistakes in the criminal justice system have been with us from the birth of the nation.
A case of systemic racial discrimination against a Bank of America subsidiary which she had initiated in 2008 had been resolved by the Bank paying over $200 million to the victims.
The Mishnah or Mishna (/ˈmɪʃnə/; Hebrew: מִשְׁנָה, "study by repetition", from the verb shanah שנה, or "to study and review", also "secondary") is the first major written collection of the Jewish oral traditions known as the Oral Torah. It is also the first major work of rabbinic literature. The Mishnah was redacted by Judah ha-Nasi at the beginning of the third century CE in a time when, according to the Talmud, the persecution of the Jews and the passage of time raised the possibility that the details of the oral traditions of the Pharisees from the Second Temple period (536 BCE – 70 CE) would be forgotten. Most of the Mishnah is written in Mishnaic Hebrew, while some parts are Aramaic.
