Justice System Quotes

Freedom is never granted; it is won. Justice is never given; it is exacted.

Whenever the law gets its hands on you, those who use the law to their own advantage will also turn it against you. Don't put your trust in the laws of men, Alvin. They were designed by strong men to improve their power over weaker ones.

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.

It is more important that innocence be protected than it is that guilt be punished, for guilt and crimes are so frequent in this world that they cannot all be punished. But if innocence itself is brought to the bar and condemned, perhaps to die, then the citizen will say, "whether I do good or whether I do evil is immaterial, for innocence itself is no protection," and if such an idea as that were to take hold in the mind of the citizen that would be the end of security whatsoever.

Not to punish evil is equivalent to authorizing it.

‘Sir, executions are intended to draw spectators,’ said Dr Johnson. ‘If they do not draw spectators, they don’t answer their purpose.’

Boston's justice system is in serious need of reform. Many of its policies and practices are antiquated, expensive, and don't really even make Boston safer.

Justice is justly represented blind, because she sees no difference in the parties concerned. She has but one scale and weight, for rich and poor, great and small.

It is better to prevent crimes than to punish them.

I could not afford to hang men for votes.

Take all the robes of all the good judges that have ever lived on the face of the earth, and they would not be large enough to cover the iniquity of one corrupt judge.

The wheels of justice sometimes turn slowly, but happily they turn.

Criminals are not the victims of society; society is the victim of criminals.

As long as the law exists, there will be morality.

No penal or political system which multiplies the population of the prisons at the rate of 10 per cent every year will solve a problem which is growing to be more and more of a danger to the social and moral life of the nation.

Every society gets the kind of criminal it deserves. What is equally true is that every community gets the kind of law enforcement it insists on.

The law is equal before all of us; but we are not all equal before the law

Justice is justice though it's always delayed and finally done only by mistake.

A good law is one that holds, whether you recognize it or not; a bad law is one that cannot, however much you ordain it.

[The Utopians] have no lawyers among them, for they consider them as a sort of people whose profession it is to disguise matters.

Due process does not require that every conceivable step be taken, at whatever cost, to eliminate the possibility of convicting an innocent person. To conclude otherwise would all but paralyze our system for enforcement of the criminal law.

The law courts of England are open to all men, like the doors of the Ritz Hotel.

The newspaper is a moral force second only to the church. It is a political power superior to parties. It is an instrument of justice coequal with the court.

We cannot and will not surrender our border to those who wish to exploit our history of compassion and justice.

The desire to punish is a desire that emanates from a place of equality and justice. The lesson I feel that we have to confront is that that impulse is so easily transmuted into something corrosive and corrupt in how it's actually put into practice. That's the danger. It's not that the impulse is wrong or unjust or not totally righteous. It's that the ways in which the system that operates, the system that we've constructed tends to not deliver the promise of equity we might want, when we look to the system to provide it.