Excessive Punishment Quotes

I've never been under the illusion that everybody on death row is innocent - far from it. My own guess is upwards of 90 percent are guilty. But a ten percent error rate if that's what it is, or even five percent, is really way too high.

Extreme justice is extreme injustice. Summum jus, summa injuria.

Many punishments sometimes, and in some cases, as much discredit a prince as many funerals a physician.

It's right to flog a dead horse sometimes, when the previous flogging has not annihilated it.

We have seen the Legislatures in our own Country deprive the Citizen of Life, of Liberty & of Property. We have seen Laws of Attainder, Punishment and Confiscation

The State may, indeed, make the drinking of one drop of liquor an offense to be punished by imprisonment, but it would be an unheard-of cruelty if it should count the drops in a single glass and make thereby a thousand offenses, and thus extend the punishment for drinking the single glass of liquor to any imprisonment of almost indefinite duration.

I just think it's so outrageous that fifteen years is the kind of minimum amount of time that any wrongfully convicted person spends in prison.

The phrase 'misuse of privilege' is becoming a free pass to tear apart pretty much anybody we choose to. It's becoming a devalued term, and it's making us lose our capacity for empathy and for distinguishing between serious and unserious transgressions.

A convict is not to be scourged until the flesh fall from his body and he die under the lash, though he may have committed a hundred offenses, for each of which, separately, a whipping of twenty stripes might be inflicted.

Manditory minimums were almost always excessive, and they made me feel unethical, even dirty.

Corruption, Racisim, Brutality. You cannot break the law to enforce the law under any circumstances.

People say I've had brushes with the law. That's not true. I've had brushes with overzealous prosecutors.

The prison system of the United States is an unendurable disgrace to a civilized country.

The fact that our legal system has become so tolerant of police lying indicates how corrupted our criminal justice system has become by declarations of war, 'get tough' mantras, and a seemingly insatiable appetite for locking up and locking out the poorest and darkest among us.

I'd call him a sadistic, hippophilic necrophile, but that would be beating a dead horse.

One of the most offensive actions by the IRS is its continued unlawful seizures of money and assets of innocent Americans, called civil asset forfeiture.

I have done prison time for 13 years without any conviction.

What constitutes a cruel and unusual punishment has not been exactly decided. It has been said that ordinarily the terms imply something inhuman and barbarous.

Impeachment of the President is not enough. Obama should be hung, drawn and quartered…. [Even that] is probably too good for him.

May as well be hanged for a sheep as a lamb.

Solitary confinement is too terrible a punishment to inflict on any human being, no matter what his crime. Hardened criminals in the men's prisons, it is said, often beg for the lash instead.

Extreme law is extreme injury. Summum jus, summa injuria.

The United States has the highest incarceration rate in the world. Many of those people deserve to be in prison; however, some of them do not.

Mandatory minimum sentences should be abolished.

An avidity to punish is always dangerous to liberty. It leads men to stretch, to misinterpret, and to misapply even the best of laws.