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Perhaps the bleakest fact of all is that the death penalty is imposed not only in a freakish and discriminatory manner, but also in some cases upon defendants who are actually innocent.
William J. Brennan
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More quotes by William J. Brennan
If our free society is to endure, and I know it will, those who govern must recognize that the Framers of the Constitution limited their power in order to preserve human dignity and the air of freedom which is our proudest heritage.
William J. Brennan
After each perceived security crisis ended, the United States has remorsefully realized that the abrogation of civil liberties was unnecessary.
William J. Brennan
The calculated killing of a human being by the state involves, by its very nature, an absolute denial of the executed person's humanity. The most vile murder does not, in my view, release the state from constitutional restraint on the destruction of human dignity.
William J. Brennan
Sex, a great and mysterious motive force in human life, has indisputably been a subject of absorbing interest to mankind through the ages.
William J. Brennan
The framers knew that liberty is a fragile thing, and so should we.
William J. Brennan
Consequences flow from a justice's interpretation in a direct and immediate way. A judicial decision respecting the incompatibility of Jim Crow with a constitutional guarantee of equality is not simply a contemplative exercise in defining the shape of a just society. It is an order
William J. Brennan
Law cannot stand aside from the social changes around it.
William J. Brennan
Our statute books gradually became laden with gross, stereotyped distinctions between the sexes and, indeed, throughout much of the 19th century the position of women in our society was, in many respects, comparable to that of blacks under the pre-Civil War slave codes.
William J. Brennan
We hold that the Constitution does not forbid the states minor intrusions into an individual's body under stringently limited conditions.
William J. Brennan
You in the media ought to be ashamed of yourselves to call the provisions and the guarantees of the Bill of Rights 'Technicalities'. They're not. We are what we are because of those guarantees.
William J. Brennan
More fundamentally, however, the answer to petitioners' objection is that there can be no impairment of executive power, whether on the state or federal level, where actions pursuant to that power are impermissible under the Constitution. Where there is no power, there can be no impairment of power.
William J. Brennan
The law is not an end in itself, nor does it provide ends. It is preeminently a means to serve what we think is right.
William J. Brennan
If we are to be as a shining city upon a hill, it will be because of our ceaseless pursuit of the constitutional ideal of human dignity.
William J. Brennan
If a policeman must know the Constitution, then why not a planner?
William J. Brennan
All ideas having even the slightest redeeming social importance - unorthodox ideas, controversial ideas, even ideas hateful to the prevailing climate of opinion, have the full protection of the guarantees [of the First Amendment].
William J. Brennan
It is tempting to pretend that minorities on death row share a fate in no way connected to our own, that our treatment of them sounds no echoes beyond the chambers in which they die. Such an illusion is ultimately corrosive, for the reverberations of injustice are not so easily confined.
William J. Brennan
It is difficult to understand precisely what the state hopes to achieve by promoting the creation and perpetuation of a subclass of illiterates within our boundaries, surely adding to the problems and costs of unemployment, welfare and crime.
William J. Brennan
If the right to privacy means anything, it is the right of the individual, married or single, to be free from unwarranted governmental intrusion.
William J. Brennan
We cannot let colorblindness become myopia which masks the reality that many created equal have been treated within our lifetimes as inferior both by the law and by their fellow citizens.
William J. Brennan
We must meet the challenge rather than wish it were not before us.
William J. Brennan