"I'd be happy if Mr. Trope gets a five dollar injection."
Powell: "Seems you have an evidentiary problem."
Jack: "My problem is I have too much evidence."
"You're willing to bet 25 years to life on that? You must have quite a pair of crystal balls."
"Rolf makes a product that any clever 12 year old can turn into a weapon of mass destruction."
"And cops shouldn't have to worry about running into Rambo every time they pull over a car."
(on blaming beer companies regarding their liability in getting minors hooked): "He is if he makes bubble gum flavored beer."
"Gun ownership is not a tradition. It's a myth, just like George Washington's cherry tree."
Adam: "I don't want this office coming off as inhumane."
Jack: "Inhumane to who? To Jenny Brandt or the society on which she wreaks havoc?"
"The public is tired of violent children being sent to bed without their dessert."
"Jenny got dealt a lousy hand. I look at her with pity
and regret. But Jenny Brandt is trouble. She battered
Aaron Polanski's head and stuffed him in a pipe. Ms.
Sharkey wants us to believe that she didn't appreciate
what she did. I don't agree. Jenny daydreams about
killing small boys, she even had a trial run with a
cat. But ultimately, what she could or could not
appreciate is irrelevant. Jenny is a loaded gun.
She's a cocked fist with a rock in it. She needs to be
stopped before she kills again. Dr. Olivet talks
about sending Jenny to a state institution like it's a
death sentence that turns the world upside down.
Aaron Polanski got a death sentence. Jenny would get
treatment. Now, everybody knows state psychiatric
care could be better. But letting Jenny get away with
murder won't help this girl. How will she ever
appreciate that her actions have consequences if there
are none? And how many children will she kill before
the adult criminal justice system can take over? Do
we have to wait and see? Ms. Sharkey would like us to
cross our fingers and hope. Hope that it won't happen
again. I have my own kind of hope. I hope the state
doctors can find a way to fix this girl. I hope that
it takes six months. But until they do, we can't
afford Ms. Sharkey's brand of hope. We need to
protect the Aaron Polanskis of this world from Jenny Brandt.
"He worked up a sweat over blueprints?"
"I don't want us to end up with egg on our faces either, Adam."
"Our luck, three more suspects pop up before the wheels touch down."
"I'm sorry, Adam, it's just so damn convenient."
Abbie: "The laws for the rich are different."
Jack: "What laws for the rich?"
(to Adam and Abbie): "You're both enjoying this, aren't you?"
Abbie: "Well I'm not saying someone goofed. For all we know Gordon just fenced the goods for DuPre� but until we find him...."
Jack: "Go with God."
"Jamie, for God's sake. You cared then, don't you care now?"
Jack: "How many times have you been arrested, Mr. Sabo?"
Sabo: "You got the sheet. Six, seven."
Jack: "Maybe it was twelve?"
"Your client's run out of miracles."
"The tried and true--when you have no case, file a motion."
"Who goes to Italy to buy life insurance during the war?"
"It's a race to the DA's office, Mr. Dell. The one who flips first wins."
"I think your brother was in serious trouble before he got here."
"Maybe they should have brought their parents' ashes in a bag to you."
"Turned out to be the only bargaining chip they had. Insurance for the insurance men."
"The numbers don't lie, Mr. Hamilton!"
"I won't let your client make his company's money pay his debt to society."
Jack: "Find women who are less--"
Abbie: "Stupid?"
Jack: "Romantic."
"Thanks for the editorial, now how �bout a solution?"
"Do I see a soft side scratching toward the light?"
"It was wrong of Mr. Hallenbeck to kill his wife just because he felt sorry for himself, and it would be wrong for this court to turn a blind eye to his crime just because we feel sorry for him."
Adam: "This teenager committed the perfect crime."
Jack: "I know. It's hard to believe."
Adam: "Make sure the jury knows he dropped the ball."
Jack: "And we get a conviction for bad parenting."
Adam: "He gave his son a sword, sent him out to practice neck chops."
Jack: "Bad parenting in the first degree."
(to Adam): "Maybe you should try the case."
Abbie: "If your hippie friends could see you now...."
Jack: "My hippie friends ride the subway to work now."
"When is it plain, old-fashioned murder?"
"Dean Tyler is as solid as the rock of Gibraltar."
"Dr. Bookman's testimony was a jumble of hypotheses and generalities."
"Nobody in that family seems able to tell the truth."
Glick: "We still have our agreement."
Jack: "'Our agreement?' What agreement?"
"It's a classic 'he said, she said' except he's dead."
Adam: "Regina Mulroney came to see me."
Jack: "To make a campaign contribution?"
"Who does Mr. Glick think would have the goods on his client, an ethics professor?"
Jack: "Fish stinks in the head."
Adam: "She'll eat you and your fish for breakfast."
Jack: "Mulroney is just a name."
Adam: "A name that elected two mayors and a governor."
Jack: "It doesn't give her immunity for murder."
Regina: "My family's philanthropy is well documented."
Jack: "And so is the influence peddling."
"And blood is thicker than water, especially Mulroney blood."
Stephanie: "I'm telling the truth!"
Jack: "There's a first time for everything, huh, Ms. Mulroney?"
Adam: "Regina's favorite joke--the difference between lace curtain Irish and shanty Irish--"
Jack: "Lace curtain Irish move the dishes before they piss in the kitchen sink."
Adam: "Yeah, she's shanty Irish and proud of it."
Jack: "And so am I."
"The Mulroney legacy lives on...at least until the next catastrophe."
"This degradation...was an expression of your love?"
Abbie: "How do you wash it off, Jack?"
Jack: "Wish I knew."
"Business was tough. That's your excuse, Mr. Braddock?"
Lawyer: "Mr. Dantoni merely seeks the same protection your office provides any other crime victim."
Jack: "'Crime victim?'"
"First time I had a defendant take the Fifth Amendment and didn't try to make him pay for it."
Adam: "Nothing redeemable about Wall Street."
Jack: "What about Center Street?"
"Perception? I thought we were in the criminal justice business."
Adam: "They dumped the boy into a minefield."
Jack: "Harlem is a minefield?"
(after Adam explains his logic):
"So it's politics as usual."
Riley: "My clients want to talk."
Jack: "Before or after your spin session with the media?"
"A melting pot? It's more like a recipe for a conviction. Half the city hates the cops, the other half has never been north of 96th Street."
"This was an equal opportunity crime."
Abbie: "Springtime in Albany. Maybe I'll meet a nice bureaucrat."
Jack: "Don't book the reception hall just yet."
Abbie; "Six years ago, he was convicted of assault and battery in Pennsylvania."
Jack: "Some guy refused to embrace success?"
Abbie; "No, someone refused to get out of the car--his wife."
Jack: "He beat his wife? Charming."
"We knocked, nobody answered."
"And Abbie? This time, get remand!"
"Let's see how they self realize this tape."
"Elias Grace conned millions of dollars out of these people and he turned out to be the biggest sucker of them all."
Abbie: "I want to know what the ethics are on turning a patient into your daughter-in-law."
Jack: "Forget the ethics, I want to know how he did it."
"This man put all the ingredients together, Adam. We can't just let him walk when the bomb goes off."
Jack: "Charging him on both counts only makes it look like we don't know what really happened. Mr. Billings would drive a truck through the reasonable doubt that creates. Besides, what's to stop him from taking the stand at the next trial and claiming that it was suicide and that he only lied here to protect himself?"
Billings: "My client seems to have put you between a rock and a hard place."
Jack: "Not that hard. This man manipulates every situation to his advantage, lies when it suits him, now confesses to a crime he didn't commit to avoid prosecution for one that he did."
Abbie: "False confessions, double jeopardy--this guy thought he could control the entire system."
Jack: "He underestimated twelve people no one could control."
"Give the jurors some credit. They make these distinctions all the time."
"There is no proven correlation between viewing smut and committing crimes."
"If the jury buys it [the defense], there's nothing I can do, but I won't pave the way. A painting is not an excuse for murder!"
"I don't care for this painting. It's offensive to me and I'm not going to stand here and tell you otherwise, but it doesn't give Larry Brunig an excuse for killing Lucy Young. Mr. Brunig wants to use his obsession as a permission slip to commit murder. If you go down that road, where does it end? Any person who is hypersensitive has a defense against a charge of murder. Any bigot can plead extreme emotional disturbance. Whether you like it or not, Mark Vee had every right to create this, Lucy Young had every right to support this, and Larry Brunig had every right to hate it. If he wanted to, Larry Brunig could stand on a street corner and rail against it to anyone who passed by. But he had no right to kill Lucy Young to express his opinion. He found Mark Vee's painting insulting to women...but he's the one who clubbed a woman's head and chopped her up in her living room. Larry Brunig planned this crime in advance and carried it out with brutal efficiency. His claim that he just wanted to confront Lucy Young about her patronage is belied by the fact that on the night in question, he packed a gun. On some level, his anger may be understandable, but don't let him use it to get away with murder."
Skoda: "His grades go down, steps back from his friends, and he's hunched over a keyboard ten hours a day. What do you call it?"
Jack: "Stupid."
Adam: "Mrs. Malone. She can't violate spousal privilege. What's her contribution?"
Jack: "Probably broken hearts and violins."
Judge: "You have any further questions for the witness?"
Jack: "Anything I ask her, she'll just turn it into a sob story."
"This job gets easier every minute."
Abbie: "So who do we believe, Shipman or Debbie Mason?"
Jack: "I've never liked doctors."
"Once you're into necrophilia, incest doesn't seem so bad."
Abbie: "We're tilting at windmills."
Jack: "What windmills? Jason Whitman was tortured and murdered."
Abbie: "Over there."
Jack: "And I've got a flesh-and-blood suspect right here."
Abbie: "So now we claim jurisdiction over every New Yorker who's killed?"
Jack: "Well, if you're going to get hung up on a little thing like jurisdiction...."
"You had the planes, the tanks, the guns. What did Jason Whitman have, a tape recorder?"
"Every murder, whether in Brooklyn, Santiago, Rwanda, or Kosovo, demands punishment by whatever legal means possible. Otherwise, the right to life is an empty promise."
"The law against murder applies to all--no matter the victim, the perpetrator, or the country where the murder was committed. It's the one moral law that recognizes no national, racial, or religious exceptions."
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