Criminal Defense Attorney Quote of the Week

By Alan M. Dershowitz, from the forward to THREE FELONIES A DAY, How the Feds Target the Innocent by Harvey A. Silverglate.

The Soviet legal system was evaluated by the Communist Party not by its ability to dispense justice but rather by its efficiency.  As Alexander Solzhenitsyn put it in his masterful work on the Gulag Archipelago, a garbage disposal system is not judged by its fairness but rather  by its ability to dispose of the garbage quickly and inexpensively.  We are not the Soviet system and there is little danger that we will ever reach nadir of injustice.  But, …we are moving in the direction of that abominable system of justice.  The difference is that  the Soviets were motivated by evil intentions – the desire to suppress legitimate dissent.  The prosecutors in our country are often motivated by good intentions – the desire to suppress predatory crime.  But the road to injustice, like the road to hell, is often paved with good intentions.  As Justice Louis Brandeis once put it:

Experience should teach us to be most on our guard to protect liberty
when the Government’s purposes are beneficent. Men born to freedom
are naturally alter to repel invasion of their liberty by evil-minded rulers.
The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of
zeal, well-meaning but without understanding.