"Which is worse? The wolf who cries before eating the lamb or the wolf who does not."— Leo Tolstoy

Sunday, July 31, 2011

Clarence Darrow's Resist Not Evil (1902) - Free E-Book

"The state furnishes no machinery for arriving at justice. Even if it were possible under any circumstances to judge, and even though men were really criminals, the state has no way of arriving at the facts. If the state pretends to administer justice this should be its highest concern. It should not be interested in convicting men or punishing crime, but administering justice between men. It is obvious to the most casual observer that the state furnishes no machinery to accomplish this result. The penal law simply takes a man into its hopper and grinds out a criminal at the end."
Clarence Darrow, Resist Not Evil (1902).

This is a link to a free e-book by Clarence Darrow about the Criminal Justice System courtesy of the Ludwig von Mises Institute. From the Institute's Resist Not Evil e-book webpage:
"This remarkable book is the most comprehensive, sweeping, compelling, and unsettling case ever penned against what is laughingly called the criminal-justice system. It is a classic, devastating at its core, that is made newly available to speak to us in our times in which the state is completely out of control.
Clarence Darrow is best known today as the Chicago lawyer who defended John T. Scopes in the Scopes Monkey Trial in 1925. But that case actually played a minor role in his life. He was an attorney by training who, from experience, learned that the entire state apparatus of courts, trials, and prisons was the worst single feature of the state. He saw the entire machinery as a gigantic fraud, a purveyor of injustice, a producer of criminality itself."

No comments:

Post a Comment