Michael Gove Quotes

The second trial was a fair trial. I do not call it a second trial. I call it a fair trial, as opposed to the first trial, which was an unfair trial, a Roman holiday.

I was very upset because I did not have a fair trial to prove my loyalty to this country.

But let us say he was (guilty). Let us for a moment say he was (guilty). What justice would there be to take his life? Justice, gentlemen? Why, I would just as soon put a hog in the electric chair as this.

Strict law is often great injustice.

Trial by jury itself, instead of being a security to persons who are accused, will be a delusion, a mockery, and a snare.

A person who is no longer with us has a rather difficult time proving his innocence …. In Texas and elsewhere in the country, people’s innocence is determined by their income.

I find it deeply upsetting when I see justice not being served. How do we as human beings deal with the unknown? The West Memphis Three trial is a joke on so many different levels.

Sentence first, verdict afterwards.

The goal is justice, not executions. We all want to make sure the process is fair and that the right person is punished. These recommendations are essential to that goal.

No man e'er felt the halter draw, With good opinion of the law.

Delay in justice is injustice.

Sometimes the wheels of justice grind slowly.

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

Justice deferred is justice denied.

We have made finality more important than fairness. We shield even clear violations of people's rights if objections aren't raised at the right time in the right way.

I don't hang anyone—the law does.

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

Justice in this country is an insurance policy. It’s not something that we’re supposed to get sometimes.

I don’t see how the Justice Department thinks they have a system that works when 50 percent of the [appeals] cases get sent back for fixing…. How does that happen? How in God’s name does that happen? Here in America. How many more cases of wrongful conviction before we can agree that the system … is broken.

The judge is condemned when the guilty is absolved.

In 1921 the temper of the times made it the special duty of a prosecutor and a court engaged in trying two Italian radicals before a jury of native New Englanders to keep the instruments of justice free from the infection of passion or prejudice. In the case of Sacco and Vanzetti no such restraints were respected. By systematic exploitation of the defendants' alien blood, their imperfect knowledge of English, their unpopular social views, and their opposition to the war, the District Attorney invoked against them a riot of political passion and patriotic sentiment; and the trial judge connived at -- one had almost written, cooperated in -- the process.... Judge Thayer's opinion stands unmatched for discrepancies between what the record discloses and what the opinion conveys. His 25,000-word document cannot accurately be described otherwise than as a farrago of misquotations, misrepresentations, suppressions, and mutilations. The disinterested inquirer could not possibly derive from it a true knowledge of the new evidence that was submitted to him as the basis for a new trial. The opinion is literally honeycombed with demonstrable errors, and a spirit alien to judicial utterance permeates the whole.

Circumstances may accumulate so strongly even against an innocent man, that directed, sharpened, and pointed, they may slay him.

Laws are confusing documents. They get in the way of justice.

A point concerning property, which ought, for the reasons I have just mentioned, to be most speedily decided, frequently exercises the wit of successions of lawyers, for many generations .… But the question concerning a man’s life, that great question in which no delay ought to be counted tedious, is commonly determined in twenty-four hours at the utmost. It is not to be wondered at that injustice and absurdity should be inseparable companions.

The system of death-penalty justice is compromised and inequitable.