A Quote by William Blackstone

It is better that ten guilty persons escape than one innocent suffer.

William Blackstone

Quote Topics

Better Escape Guilty Guilty Person Innocent Persons Suffer Ten Than

Quote Author

William Blackstone
English - Judge
July 10, 1723 - February 14, 1780

It is better that ten guilty escape than one innocent suffer.

William Blackstone

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.

Benjamin Franklin

All judges had rather that ten innocent should suffer than that one guilty should escape.

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

When one acts on pity against justice, it is the good whom one punishes for the sake of the evil; when one saves the guilty from suffering, it is the innocent whom one forces to suffer. There is no escape from justice, nothing can be unearned and unpaid for in the universe, neither in matter nor in spirit—and if the guilty do not pay, then the innocent have to pay it.

Ayn Rand

It is better and more satisfactory to acquit a thousand guilty persons than to put a single innocent one to death.

Maimonides

I come from the liberal side of thinking: Better one guilty man should walk free than one innocent man found guilty.

Ian McShane

It's not about whether you are innocent or guilty. It's about whether or not you can prove you're innocent. If you can't prove you're innocent, then you're considered guilty. It's been flipped: Now it's guilty until proven innocent.

Ronald Jones

Just as the liar 's punishment is, not in the least that he is not believed , but that he cannot believe any one else; so a guilty society can more easily be persuaded that any apparently innocent act is guilty than that any apparently guilty act is innocent.

George Bernard Shaw

It's better that the innocent should live than that the guilty die

Brent Weeks

It is better to risk saving a guilty man than to condemn an innocent one.

Voltaire

An innocent man, if accused, can be acquitted; a guilty man, unless accused, cannot be condemned. It is, however, more advantageous to absolve an innocent than not to prosecute a guilty man.

Marcus Tullius Cicero

Daily the Negro is coming more and more to look upon law and justice, not as protecting safeguards, but as sources of humiliation and oppression. The laws are made by men who have little interest in him; they are executed by men who have absolutely no motive for treating the black people with courtesy or consideration; and, finally, the accused law-breaker is tried, not by his peers, but too often by men who would rather punish ten innocent Negroes than let one guilty one escape.

W. E. B. Du Bois

Any time that when you're rich and guilty, you're treated better than if you're poor and innocent, something has to change.

Rob Morgan

We have a system of justice in [the US] that treats you much better if you're rich and guilty than if you're poor and innocent. Wealth, not culpability, shapes outcomes.

Bryan Stevenson

A new theory is guilty until proven innocent, and the pre-existing theory innocent until proven guilty ... Continental drift was guilty until proven innocent.