Thomas Sowell Quotes

I always thought that was one of the single most important things a prosecutor could do is to seek justice for the families of victims.

In Ferguson, there are witnesses who say Brown had his hands up when he was shot. That should be enough probable cause to go to trial to then determine if Officer Wilson is guilty or not. It is at trial that he can then defend himself and his attorneys can present their own witnesses and their own defense.

The vast majority of A.D.A.s put everything on the line to make sure justice is served. That's what I love about prosecutors and the New York police.

Technology is neutral: It convicts and finds innocents. We must make it a regularized part of the system, giving defendants access to DNA testing and evidence whenever it might be relevant.

The reason I like the criminal justice system is there aren't Republican or Democrat victims or police officers or prosecutors. It's about respect for the rule of law!

The most malign of all these dangers today is disregard and disobedience of law. Crime is increasing. Confidence in rigid and speedy justice is decreasing.

Law enforcement does not ask an advantage in its struggle with the lawless. It asks only that the scales of justice be balanced. The cause of justice is not served when hardened criminals are allowed to go free through legal technicalities.

To declare that in the administration of criminal law the end justifies the means -- to declare that the Government may commit crimes in order to secure conviction of a private criminal -- would bring terrible retribution.

The justice system is confused in trying to understand it, but frankly, if it paid attention to the really blatant cases and did a good job with that, we would be light years ahead of where we are now.

A judge sometimes must release a criminal. He doesn't like it, she doesn't like it, but the law requires it. And the context of an election in which you are "soft on crime" betrays a misunderstanding of the judicial process and a misunderstanding of the Constitution.

We cannot afford to have the confidence of the public, victims, and witnesses in our justice system undermined because the wrong people are being found guilty and the real criminals are wandering the streets.

In this era of mass incarceration, the police shouldn't be trusted any more than any other witness, perhaps less so.

People constantly complain to me about news coverage of criminal cases. 'What happened to the presumption of innocence?' they ask at almost every turn. Well, I'm tired of it.

Prosecutorial misconduct is one of the most detrimental problems in our criminal justice system, because prosecutors are essentially the most powerful actors in our justice system because they set the charges, they basically set up the rules of the game.

There is nothing just or fair about what happened to Jordan Edwards. And his story is yet another in a long line of tragedies that now powerfully remind us of the long way we still have to go in creating a fair and just relationship between law enforcement, our criminal justice system, and the public our laws are supposed to protect.

It's really important to me that the public have confidence in their criminal justice system. We don't operate very well if the public doesn't trust us.

The police have the right to prosecute people, but not use violence.

From a victim's point of view, our justice system is hardly fit for purpose. No doubt individual failings by police and prosecutors provide part of the explanation.

Years now, decades, of visiting my parents behind bars taught me hard lessons about how broken the criminal justice system is - about how devoid of compassion it is. It's not healing the harm that victims experience. It's not rehabilitating people. And in many ways, it's making us less safe.

Being the DA was, without a doubt, the best job in the world. I loved knowing that people would get their justice.

When I travel and speak across the country, I often tell college students that we are making a significant mistake when we say to each other that this criminal justice of ours is broken. To say it's broken would be to suggest that it was well designed and had good intentions from the start.

I think our criminal justice system has two problems. We have systematic problems and we have people problems. So if the hearts of people are not about justice than any system you have won't work.

I find it very frustrating how much passing the buck there is in the criminal justice system when it comes to taking responsibility for outcomes.

As a former federal prosecutor with experience prosecuting both violent and white-collar criminals, I've seen what it looks like when the powerful prey on the vulnerable.

I think there is no greater job anybody can have than having been a prosecutor.