Sentencing Quotes

The people would be just as noisy if they were going to see me hanged.

Criticism always seemed to me a lot like police work. You look for clues, fingerprints, motives. You need to construct an airtight case.

If you commit a crime, you're guilty.

A murder is not a martyr. He or she is just a murderer.

I'm a prosecutor first and foremost, and as a judge, I put people in jail for extended periods of time when that was appropriate.

Thieves must sit in prison.

No one politician should be allowed to judge the guilt, to charge an individual, to judge the guilt of an individual and to execute an individual.

The laws only can determine the punishment of crimes, and the authority of making penal laws can only reside with the legislator, who represents the whole society united by the social compact.

Prison works.

'Murder in the First' takes 12 episodes to explore the crime and the issues surrounding it, all in the hopes of answering the question, 'How did we get to this point?'

Robbery is a crime; rape is a crime; murder is a crime; treason is a crime and crime must be punished. The law provides for it, and the courts are open. Treason must be made infamous and traitors must be impoverished.

Wherever they have been arraigned, a plain charge has been exhibited against them. They have had an impartial trial and have been permitted to make their defense.

I mean I've never been thrown in jail in New York or Los Angeles.

Yeah, I've gotten a few letters from prison.

How accurately can the law fix the crime? There has to be a mechanism for very fast action. The law is like this: catch them and punish them.

The American justice system administers punishment. It does not conduct inquests and it does not find facts.

I've always been tremendously interested in criminal law. It goes to a deep interest I have in prisons and the criminal element, and what we do as a society with it. I've always been touched by the idea of criminality.

You don't hear TV cops griping because they have to enforce some Draconian law that shouldn't be on the books in the first place, or lamenting vindictive excesses in sentencing. Hollywood, supposedly a frothing cauldron of liberalism, has always been conservative on crime.

Every first year law student learns that sentencing has four goals: retribution, incapicitation, deterrence, and rehabilitation.

I love being a judge, and I anticipate being a judge for the rest of my life.

I asked a man in prison once how he happened to be there and he said he had stolen a pair of shoes. I told him if he had stolen a railroad he would be a United States Senator

My earliest memories are of visiting the justice department.

When we watch courtroom dramas, we tend to identify with the kindhearted defense attorney, but give us the power, and we become like hanging judges.

You go to traffic court in many locations throughout the country, and you can spell justice - J-U-S-T dash U-S. Just us.

Martha Stewart is being prosecuted not for who she is but what she did.