Sixth Amendment Quotes

When they took the Fourth Amendment, I was silent because I don't deal drugs. When they took the Sixth Amendment, I kept quiet because I know I'm innocent. When they took the Second Amendment, I said nothing because I don't own a gun. Now they've come for the First Amendment, and I can't say anything at all.

 . . . the Sixth Amendment is sacrosanct and guarantees everyone the right to a fair trial. You’re either for the Constitution or against it. You can’t pick and choose your favorite amendments. Why, Ted, is the Second more important than the Sixth?

What is citizen within a social contract where our Sixth Amendment right to a fair trial can be suspended in the event of our completely legal (but extrajudicial) murder by police?

If you are asked any question by a police officer or a government agent and you realize that it is not in your best interest to answer, you should not mention the Fifth Amendment privilege or tell the police that you wish to exercise your right to avoid incriminating yourself. In this day and age, there is too great a danger that the police and the prosecutor might later persuade the judge to use that statement against you as evidence of your guilt. And if they do, to make matters much worse, you have no guarantee that the FBI agent in your case will not slightly misremember your exact words. [....] Even if the officer gets only a few words wrong, it only takes a slight rewording of the privilege to make it sound like a confession. So what do you do instead? Instead mention your Sixth Amendment right to a lawyer, and tell the police that you want a lawyer.

Fourth Amendment, which requires a judge-issued warrant for an arrest; the Fifth Amendment, which requires a grand jury indictment before a person is held for trial; and the Sixth Amendment, which says that a person can be imprisoned only after conviction by a jury based on proof beyond a reasonable doubt.

and over the centuries, we clawed out access to the ballot for people of color through the Fifteenth Amendment, women in the Nineteenth Amendment, and young voters in the Twenty-Sixth Amendment. But each of those amendments contained a loophole for suppression: leaving implementation to the states, particularly the ones most hostile to inclusion.

The law was written at a time when folks were not that interested in the Fourth Amendment. Or the Fifth Amendment, for that matter, Or, actually, the Sixth." He chortled lightly to himself. "Or the eighth.

Any lasting solutions come solely from the U.S. Constitution, the highest legal bar imaginable; and over the centuries, we clawed out access to the ballot for people of color through the Fifteenth Amendment, women in the Nineteenth Amendment, and young voters in the Twenty-Sixth Amendment. But each of those amendments contained a loophole for suppression: leaving implementation to the states, particularly the ones most hostile to inclusion.

The Constitution guarantees the right of the People to have any person they choose assist them in court. This was the first Constitutional right the lawyers’ cartel had to scrap. To this end, the Bar Association, through its member judges, interpreted the word “counsel” in the Sixth Amendment to mean “attorney-at-law” (which is, by definition, a member of their cartel). The word counsel can be found in any dictionary, and its primary meaning is not “attorney-at-law.” In fact, it means any person who gives advice.

[Adam Smith] was above all an ethical thinker. He wrote the two books, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759, finishing the much-amended sixth edition just before he died, in 1790) and An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776, with its own sixth edition, slightly amended, appearing in 1791). Such a meager output would make him a borderline case for tenure nowadays in many universities, and a sure-fire no in most departments of economics. “Good Lord,” the economists would say after a hurried look at his academic credentials, “he didn’t publish any articles in the American Economic Review reporting statistical tests or field experiments or mathematical proofs of existence!

Here, indeed, lies properly the cardinal symptom of the whole wide-spread malady. Faith is gone out; Scepticism is come in. Evil abounds and accumulates; no man has Faith to withstand it, to amend it, to begin by amending himself: it must even go on accumulating. While hollow languor and vacuity is the lot of the Upper, and want and stagnation of the Lower, and universal misery is very certain, what other thing is certain? That a Lie cannot be believed! Philosophism knows only this: her other Belief is mainly that, in spiritual supersensual matters, no Belief is possible. Unhappy! Nay, as yet the Contradiction of a Lie is some kind of Belief; but the Lie with its Contradiction once swept away, what will remain? The five unsatiated Senses will remain, the sixth insatiable Sense (of Vanity); the whole dæmonic nature of man will remain,—hurled forth to rage blindly without rule or rein; savage itself, yet with all the tools and weapons of civilisation: a spectacle new in History.

If you’re a person of means, you get full service for all ten amendments, and even a few that aren’t listed. But if you owe, if you rent, you get a slightly thinner, more tubercular version of the Fourth Amendment, the First Amendment, the Fifth and Sixth Amendments, and so on.

In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the State and district wherein the crime shall have been committed, which district shall have been previously ascertained by law, and to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation; to be confronted with the witnesses against him; to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor, and to have the Assistance of Counsel for his defense. - Sixth Amendment, United States Constitution

We have to prove that Rennell Price’s trial lawyer was so incompetent that his client was denied the effective assistance of counsel granted by the Sixth Amendment. It won’t be easy, given that some courts have ruled that even sleeping through your client’s trial is not enough to qualify.

Smith had a possible solution: a “dying declaration,” made by a witness in advance of certain death. There was one major challenge. Under the confrontation clause of the Sixth Amendment to the Constitution, every criminal defendant has a right to confront the witness against him or her. A dying declaration violates that right; the words of the witness are hearsay. Still, these words could be used in court if recorded properly and approved by a judge.

In closing, I offer you this from the prologue to The Rule of St. Benedict, the Rule that started it all, dating to the sixth century: In drawing up its regulations, we hope to set down nothing harsh, nothing burdensome. The good of all concerned, however, may prompt us to a little strictness in order to amend faults and to safeguard love. Do not be daunted immediately by fear and run away from the road that leads to salvation. It is bound to be narrow at the outset. But as we progress in this way of life and in faith, we shall run on the path of God’s commandments, our hearts overflowing with the inexpressible delight of love.[72]

The sixth model, that of Professor McConnell, pays close attention to the use of the word “retained” in the Ninth Amendment. McConnell argues the Ninth was adopted with the backdrop of the state of nature theory of philosopher John Locke. Under Locke’s view—recognized as influential at the time of the American Revolution and the Constitution’s framing—people have “natural rights” in the state of nature, the theoretical mode of living before people ever came together to form a government and establish civil society.51 People discover that it benefits them to give up some of their rights in exchange for creating a government that will then allow them to live in greater security and achieve greater prosperity. Thus they form a society where they give up rights, such as the right to punish others for wronging them, and turn those rights over to their collective body, the government. But they by no means give up all natural rights. Those rights that they do not relinquish they “retain.

Arif, will we, a handful of writers, succeed in making amends for such a vast trauma?

Most Americans were familiar with their Miranda rights; they’d heard the words recited so often on the plethora of police and detective shows populating television, they could recite their Miranda rights from memory. What most didn’t know was their right to an attorney was guaranteed by the Fifth Amendment, but only during a criminal interrogation, and only if the person was taken into police custody—the right was intended to prevent coercion and intimidation. Even fewer knew the Sixth Amendment embodied a second constitutional right to counsel when a prosecutor commenced a criminal prosecution by filing a complaint, or the suspect was indicted by a grand jury. The fallacy most Americans harbored was that they could simply shout, “I want a lawyer!” when confronted by a police officer, and the officer couldn’t talk to them. Not so. In fact, in the absence of a criminal charge, and so long as they didn’t take Strickland into custody, Tracy and Kins could talk to him until the cows came home. For now, however, Tracy was content to humor Montgomery.

As Sir Eric Williams wrote in From Columbus to Castro: The situation was more discouraging in Cuba, which was in every sense of the term an American colony. The Americans openly supported, in the interest of stability, the dictator Machado who raised no awkward questions of Cuban independence and who was concerned merely with the exile or assassination of hostile labour leaders and the reckless and enormous increase of the public debt, both public and private. America dominated the scene. One American writer has stated that no one could become President of Cuba without the endorsement of the United States. According to another, the American Ambassador in Havana was the most important man in Cuba. A third analyses United States policy as "putting a veto on revolution whatever the cause". The Platt Amendment dominated the relations between the United States and Cuba. On the occasion of a threatened rebellion by a Negro political party, the Independent Party of Colour, the United States sent troops to Cuba. In reply to Cuba's protests Secretary of State Knox stated: "The United States does not undertake first to consult the Cuban Government if a crisis arises requiring a temporary landing somewhere." In 1933 Ambassador Sumner Welles identified six desirable characteristics which a Cuban president should possess. These read in part: "First, his thorough acquaintance with the desires of this Government… Sixth, his amenability to suggestions or advice which might be made to him by the American Legation.

Similarly, the amendments covering the criminal justice system—the Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, and Eighth—have offered little to no protection for African Americans because of numerous Supreme Court decisions that have embedded racism and racial profiling into policing, trial procedures, and sentencing.

Instead mention your Sixth Amendment right to a lawyer, and tell the police that you want a lawyer. Is that honest? Not entirely, because it sounds like you are implying that you might be willing to talk to them after a lawyer shows up, and of course that is not true, and your lawyer will not agree to that.