Criminal Legal System
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Address Before Young Israel of Pelham Parkway at the Concourse Plaza Hotel, New York City
Organized crime is a national problem. The racketeer is not someone dressed in a black shirt, white tie and diamond stickpin, whose activities affect only a remote underworld circle. He is more likely to be outfitted in a gray flannel suit, and his influence is more likely to be as far-reaching as that of an…
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Speech at the Law Day Exercises of the University of Georgia Law School, Athens, Georgia
In too many major communities of our country, organized crime has become big business. It knows no state lines. It drains off millions of dollars of our national wealth, infecting legitimate business, labor unions and even sports. Tolerating organized crime promotes the cheap philosophy that everything is a racket. It promotes cynicism among adults. It…
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Statement Before Senate
The data coming to light now shows that we have done all too little to rehabilitate and reintegrate into society those who have once run afoul of the law enforcement
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Speech in New York
We are impressed by the nature of our problem when we are confronted with the fact that almost half of the murderers in Death Row at Sing Sing are under twenty-one. And the number of arrests of youths under eighteen is increasing steadily.
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Speech in Chicago
The more closely one looks at the cost and deployment of our crime prevention efforts, the more apparent it becomes that we have put too much responsibility at the end of the line, rather than at the beginning. Enforcement and correction can only do part of the job.
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Speech in Chicago
I believe that, as long as most men are honest, corruption is twice vicious. It hurts men and it undermines their fundamental rights. We must be doubly wary, with private and public vigilance.
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Speech at Academy of Trial Lawyers, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
The legitimate purpose of bail is to ensure that defendants appear for trial. It has been distorted into systematic injustice. Every year thousands of persons are kept in jail for weeks and even months following arrest.
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Speech at Academy of Trial Lawyers, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
Through most of the United States today the bail system is a cruel and illogical institution which perpetuates injustice in the name of the law. In actual practice, control is frequently in the hands of bondsmen rather than the courts.
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Bryan Stevenson
Born in 1959, Bryan Stevenson grew up in rural southern Delaware and spent his early classroom years at a “colored” elementary school. By second grade, his school was formally desegregated, but Black kids still played separately from white kids and often continued to use the back door to enter the doctor’s office. Stevenson’s father took…
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Andrea James
Attorney Andrea James has been engaged with criminal justice issues since her days as a youth worker. She is the founder and executive director of Families for Justice as Healing—a criminal justice reform organization that advocates for community wellness alternatives to incarceration, with a focus on women. She is a 2015 Soros Justice Fellow and…
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Thurgood Marshall
Thurgood Marshall was born in 1908, in Baltimore—his father was a railroad porter and his mother, a schoolteacher. One of his great-grandfathers had been taken as a slave from the Congo to Maryland, where he was eventually freed. Growing up in Baltimore, Marshall experienced the racial discrimination that shaped his future career. After graduating from…
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Helen Prejean
Biography: Louisiana, 1977. Brothers Patrick and Eddie Sonnier admitted mugging David LeBlanc, age seventeen, and Loretta Bourque, eighteen, one autumn night, but each blamed the other for murdering them and raping Bourque. Eddie was sentenced to life, Patrick to death by electrocution. In the summer of 1982, Sister Helen Prejean had moved into St. Thomas…
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