Use of a mentally ill person's involuntary confession is antithetical to the notion of fundamental fairness embodied in the due process clause.
Interpretation
Confessions obtained under duress from a mentally ill person are unfair and unjust.
William J. Brennan highlights a critical issue in the legal system regarding the treatment of mentally ill individuals. He argues that using an involuntary confession from such a person contradicts the principles of fairness and justice that are fundamental to the due process clause, emphasizing the need for protecting the rights of the vulnerable in society.
In practice
During a discussion on legal reforms, one might quote this to emphasize the importance of fairness in the justice system.
If our free society is to endure, those who govern must recognize human dignity and accept the enforcement of constitutional limitations on their power conceived by the Framers . . . . Such recognition will not come from a technical understanding of the organs of government, or the new forms of wealth they administer. It requires something different, something deeper-a personal confrontation with the wellsprings of our society.
Law cannot stand aside from the social changes around it.
At bottom, the battle has been waged on moral grounds. The country has debated whether a society for which the dignity of the individual is the supreme value can, without a fundamental inconsistency, follow the practice of deliberately putting one of its members to death.
There can be no doubt that our Nation has had a long and unfortunate history of sex discrimination. Traditionally, such discrimination was rationalized by an attitude of "romantic paternalism" which, in practical effect, put women, not on a pedestal, but in a cage.
The Framers of the Bill of Rights did not purport to 'create' rights. Rather, they designed the Bill of Rights to prohibit our Government from infringing rights and liberties presumed to be preexisting.
Congress acknowledged that society's accumulated myths and fears about disability and disease are as handicapping as are the physical limitations that flow from actual impairment.
I am doomed to remember a boy with a wrecked voice. Not because of his voice, or because he was the smallest person I ever knew, or even because he was the instrument of my mother's death, but because he is the reason I believe in God. I am a Christian because of Owen Meany.
Justice is the first virtue of social institutions.
I think it's much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers which might be wrong.
While I meditate on the gulf towards which I travelled, and reflect on my youthful disobedience, for these things I weep, mine eye runneth down with water.
Christianity remains to this day the greatest misfortune of humanity.
Truth, Sir, is a cow which will yield such people no more milk, and so they are gone to milk the bull.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.