Dale Carpenter Quotes & Sayings

Police throughout the United States have been caught fabricating, planting, and manipulating evidence to obtain convictions where cases would otherwise be very weak. Some authorities regard police perjury as so rampant that it can be considered a "subcultural norm rather than an individual aberration" of police officers. Large-scale investigations of police units in almost every major American city have documented massive evidence of tampering, abuse of the arresting power, and discriminatory enforcement of laws. There also appears to be widespread police perjury in the preparation of reports because police know these reports will be used in plea bargaining. Officers often justify false and embellished reports on the grounds that it metes out a rough justice to defendants who are guilty of wrongdoing but may be exonerated on technicalities. [internal citations omitted] — Dale Carpenter

[Justice] Murphy... who ruled against the state [anti-sodomy] law... didn't see why the Supreme Court had to dwell on the historical background of sodomy laws [before striking them down]. All one really had to know to decide the case, he reasoned, was that Texas and its legions of moralizers let people have sex with animals. End of story. — Dale Carpenter

I'm sorry, anal sex," Beavers continued, embarrassed by her slip of the tongue. — Dale Carpenter

If citizens cannot trust that laws will be enforced in an evenhanded and honest fashion, they cannot be said to live under the rule of law. Instead, they live under the rule of men corrupted by the law. — Dale Carpenter

Start with the observation that American law is not designed to catch and punish every instance of illegal conduct. Nothing short of a totalitarian state could do that. It is designed to prosecute persons when there is a reasonable basis for believing they have committed a crime, and then to convict them when there is no reasonable doubt that they are guilty. — Dale Carpenter