Words matter. These are the best Defendant Quotes from famous people such as Lawrence O’Donnell, Howie Carr, Christine Todd Whitman, Floyd Abrams, Vincent Bugliosi, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
Around the courthouse when defense lawyers are chatting about their cases, the only question they ask each other is can you put your guy on the stand? Those conversations always assume the defendant is guilty. The question is just about the degree of difficulty in presenting a defense.
The higher someone’s profile, the easier it is for a defendant to trade him up to the feds. Mr. Big is always a better catch than Mr. Small.
Trump is not the victim of the judicial system; he is or has been the defendant in 3,500 lawsuits – that’s not the mark of a victim but rather a perpetrator.
Here we have a situation where a defendant in a case agrees to an interview with Dan Rather. It happened to be not confidential. But it was an interview with Dan Rather.
We should not televise trials. There’s only one purpose for a criminal trial. It’s to determine whether or not the defendant committed the crime. Anything that interferes or has the potential of interfering with that should automatically be prohibited.
The EPA code needs to set forth a clear, regular, and rational system of penalties for violations of its code, with the amount of the penalty set in proportion to the amount of pollutant released by a given defendant, and no penalties imposed in the absence of any pollutant released.
I told the truth when I said I have never been arrested. I have never been handcuffed or fingerprinted. I have never appeared in court as a defendant.
The defendant wants to hide the truth because he’s generally guilty. The defense attorney’s job is to make sure the jury does not arrive at that truth.
Publicly, defense lawyers cling to the text book theory that the defendant has no burden of proof and that no negative inference should ever be taken when a defendant doesn’t defend himself on the witness stand.
A defendant can use discovery to run out the clock on the plaintiff and to make the plaintiff run out of money.
The prosecution has an ethical duty to ensure not just that they get a conviction when the defendant is guilty, but also to ensure that they get it by means of fair trial, and that means a fair trial for the defense as well as the prosecution.
The coalition government made it clear from the outset that it would proceed with defendant anonymity in rape cases only if the evidence justifying it was clear and sound. In the absence of any such finding, it has reached the conclusion that the proposal does not stand on its merits.
I got the chance to argue my first case in Supreme Court, a criminal case arising in Alabama that involved the right of a defendant to counsel at a critical stage in a capital case before a trial.
If everyone on the Court always voted for the prosecution against the defendant, for the corporation against the plaintiffs, and for the government against the condemned, a vital spark of American democracy would be extinguished.
President Trump is a defense lawyer’s worst nightmare – and a dream defendant for special counsel Robert Mueller.
I’m sure I took some licks at the system, and at trials and lawyers in general. I’ve seen enough of them for so many years both as a cop and a defendant in defamation cases.
Practically, every defense lawyer knows that the jury desperately wants to hear from the defendant and that the only reason not to put him on the stand is that he is soooo guilty that every answer he gives after his name will eradicate any shred of reasonable doubt.
To force a lawyer on a defendant can only lead him to believe that the law contrives against him.
To exclude all jurors who would be in the slightest way affected by the prospect of the death penalty would be to deprive the defendant of the impartial jury to which he or she is entitled under the law.
Ask any experienced defense lawyer: the real risks are for an accused person who is innocent. A guilty defendant has many more options available.
In civil or criminal litigation in a jury case, the only way for a defendant to avoid a trial is for a judge to rule that there was no evidence from which the jury could find for the other side.
Demanding that all of us presume every defendant innocent outside of a courtroom is to demand that we stop evaluating facts, thereby suffocating independent thought and opinion. There is nothing ‘reasonable’ about that.
