Founding Fathers Quotes on Criminal Justice and the Right to Counsel in the Sixth Amendment

“Errors, or caprices of the temper, can be pardoned and forgotten; but a cold, deliberate crime of the heart...is not to be washed away.”

“Silence becomes a kind of crime when it operates as a cover or an encouragement to the guilty.”

“Another apprehension is that a majority cannot be induced to adopt the trial by jury; and I consider that as the only anchor, ever yet imagined by man, by which a government can be held to the principles of its constitution.”

“That in controversies respecting property, and in suits between man and man, the ancient trial by jury is preferable to any other and ought to be held sacred.”

“Representative government and trial by jury are the heart and lungs of liberty. Without them, we have no other fortification against being ridden like horses, fleeced like sheep, worked like cattle, and fed and clothed like swine and hounds.”

“Trial by jury, the best of all safeguards for the person, the property, and the fame of every individual.”

“You seem...to consider the judges as the ultimate arbiters of all constitutional questions – a very dangerous doctrine indeed, and one which would place us under the despotism of an oligarchy. Our Judges are as honest as other men, and not more so. They have, with others, the same passions for party, for power, and the privilege of their corps. Their maxim is, boni judicis est ampliare jurisdictionem, and their power the more dangerous, as they are in office for life, and not responsible, as the other functionaries are, to the elective control. The Constitution has erected no such single tribunal, knowing that, to whatever hands confided, with the corruptions of time and party, its members would become despots.”