Don’t hire a prison consultant.

For centuries the death penalty, often accompanied by barbarous refinements, has been trying to hold crime in check; yet crime persists. Why? Because the instincts that are warring in man are not, as the law claims, constant forces in a state of equilibrium.

You don’t send people to prison on the basis of what other people imagine, or on the basis of media sound bites like ‚shooting an unarmed child,‘ when that ‚child‘ was beating him bloody.

Let’s be clear about this, and let’s be clear: we should not be creating incentives to house people in prison. We should be creating incentives instead to shut the revolving door into prison.

I think most defense attorneys know, to some extent, their clients are guilty.

None of my peers avoided prison. None of ‚em.

Most states in the union where the death penalty is theoretically on the books don’t have executions.

With the advent of DNA, we know that people have been convicted and sentenced to death who later proved not to be guilty of the crime.

I never sympathise with the accused unless there’s a chance the accused is not guilty, but I certainly don’t ever sympathise with the criminal.

From the beginning, Mandela and Tambo was besieged with clients. We were not the only African lawyers in South Africa, but we were the only firm of African lawyers. For Africans, we were the firm of first choice and last resort.

Generally speaking, the public appetite for criminal justice policy is just tough talk.

‚Getting smart on crime‘ does not mean reducing sentences or punishments for crimes.

I don’t like jail, they got the wrong kind of bars in there.

Algorithms diminish public safety in this country. They ask us to pretend that lengthy arrest records and violent crimes don’t matter. They ask police to scoop up the bad guys only for the courts to immediately release them. They turn us into a bad joke.