Sentencing Quotes

While awaiting sentencing, I decided to give stand-up comedy a shot. The judge had suggested I get my act together, and I took him seriously. (Tim Allen)

Mandatory sentencing guidelines have become as complicated and detailed as the IRS code!

Harold H. Greene

You don't hear TV cops griping because they have to enforce some Draconian law that shouldn't be on the books in the first place, or lamenting vindictive excesses in sentencing. Hollywood, supposedly a frothing cauldron of liberalism, has always been conservative on crime.

Tom Shales

The massive prison-building project that began in the 1980s created the means of concentrating and managing what the capitalist system had implicitly declared to be a human surplus. In the meantime, elected officials and the dominant media justified the new draconian sentencing practices, sending more and more people to prison in the frenzied drive to build more and more prisons by arguing that this was the only way to make our communities safe from murderers, rapists, and robbers.

Angela Davis

I called him because it made me so damned angry to think of that bastard sentencing a citizen for four months of hard labor for a minor traffic offense and screwing up my brother's campaign and making our country look ridiculous before the world.

Robert F. Kennedy

Now, I - for several years while I was researching this book, I felt quite obsessed by thoughts about sentencing, punishment, how judges arrive at their decisions.

Helen Garner

The system wasn't working, and I thought it was time to err on the side of a new model. What might work, I thought, was a system that promoted personal accountability, consistency, and certainty. Congress could say people who committed the same federal crime, under the same circumstances, were going to jail for the same amount of time. We could give judges a narrower set of sentencing guidelines to work with, and felons would be required to pay the same price. We'd be judging the crime, not the person.

Joe Biden

The risk of racial prejudice infecting a capital sentencing proceeding is especially serious in light of the complete finality of the death sentence.

Byron White

Anyone who thinks it's smart to cut immigration is sentencing Australia to poverty.

Malcolm Turnbull

We cannot explore any mode of sentencing a man to imprisonment, who is imprisoned already, but by tacking one imprisonment to the other.

John Eardley Wilmot

High Court judge presiding in a sodomy case, seeking advice on sentencing: "Could you tell me, what do you think one ought to give a man who allows himself to be buggered?"
Smith: "Oh, thirty shillings or two pounds; whatever you happen to have on you." (F. E. Smith, 1st Earl of Birkenhead)

You pay a price when you have an objective sentencing system. That is, nothing is perfect.

Jeff Sessions

Mandatory minimum sentencing has disproportionately affected blacks, Hispanics and others who often don't have the financial means to fight back.

Rand Paul