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These death sentences are cruel and unusual in the same way that being struck by lightning is cruel and unusual.

Potter Stewart

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Potter Stewart
Age: 70 †
Born: 1915
Born: January 23
Died: 1985
Died: December 7
Judge
Politician
Jackson
Michigan
Struck
Lightning
Cruel
Unusual
Sentences
Death
Way

More quotes by Potter Stewart

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May the state fence in the harmless mentally ill solely to save its citizens from exposure to those whose ways are different? One might as well ask if the state, to avoid public unease, could incarcerate all who are physically unattractive or socially eccentric.
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I think that the Court's task, in this as in all areas of constitutional adjudication, is not responsibly aided by the uncritical invocation of metaphors like the ' wall of separation,' a phrase nowhere to be found in the Constitution.
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The Court today holds the Congress may say that some of the poor are too poor even to go bankrupt. I cannot agree.
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The right to defy an unconstitutional statute is basic in our scheme. Even when an ordinance requires a permit to make a speech, to deliver a sermon, to picket, to parade, or to assemble, it need not be honored when it's invalid on its face.
Potter Stewart
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For the Fourth Amendment protects people, not places. What a person knowingly exposes to the public, even in his own home or office, is not a subject of Fourth Amendment protection. But what he seeks to preserve as private, even in an area accessible to the public, may be constitutionally protected.
Potter Stewart
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I shall not attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description (of pornography), and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it, and the motion picture involved in this case is not that.
Potter Stewart
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A person's mere propinquity to others independently suspected of criminal activity does not give rise to probable cause to search that person.
Potter Stewart
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The 4th Amendment and the personal rights it secures have a long history. At the very core stands the right of a man to retreat into his own home and there be free from unreasonable governmental intrusion.
Potter Stewart
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We are concerned here only with the imposition of capital punishment for the crime of murder, and when a life has been taken deliberately by the offender, we cannot say that the punishment is invariably disproportionate to the crime. It is an extreme sanction suitable to the most extreme of crimes.
Potter Stewart
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We dedicated ourselves to a powerful idea - organic law rather than naked power. There seems to be universal acceptance of that idea in the nation.
Potter Stewart
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Ethics is knowing the difference between what you have a right to do and what is right to do.
Potter Stewart
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I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material but I know it when I see it.
Potter Stewart
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In fact, a fundamental interdependence exists between the personal right to liberty and the personal right to property.
Potter Stewart
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Censorship reflects a society's lack of confidence in itself. It is a hallmark of an authoritarian regime.
Potter Stewart
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For me this is not something that can be swept under the rug and forgotten in the interest of forced Sunday togetherness.
Potter Stewart
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Fairness is what justice really is.
Potter Stewart