Former child soldier sums up the point of war crime trials

While I was doing my interviews [of former child soldiers in Sierra Leone], I had asked a few children what they thought of the Special Court, if the ones living far from Freetown even knew of it. One boy, not even thirteen at the time I met him, put it best: "For some of us, our lives were miserable, they trained us to come up in a bad way. By trying them, it shows people that if you do bad, there will be consequences."

Jessica Alexander, Chasing Chaos: My Decade in and out of Humanitarian Aid (New York: Broadway Books, 2013), p. 298.

Everyone has a right to a fair trial, even a war criminal

After hearing so many stories of pain and anguish from civilians [in Sierra Leone], I didn't understand how people—my friends—could defend the perpetrators. "Look, this whole international criminal tribunal thing would be a circus if there wasn't a good defense," my American friend Scott said. . . .

"Everyone—even a war criminal, Jess—has a right to a fair trial. The prosecution would have a field day with these guys if we didn't hold them to some standard. They might very well have been war criminals, but it was for particular acts at particular times. They didn't do everything in all places at all times, which is what the prosecution is throwing at them."

Jessica Alexander, Chasing Chaos: My Decade in and out of Humanitarian Aid (New York: Broadway Books, 2013), pp. 279-80.

An innocent man hanged—not the first or the last

Innocent men have perished before James, and are like to keep on perishing (in spite of all our wisdom) till the end of time. . . . He had been hanged by fraud and violence, and the world wagged along, and there was not a pennyweight of difference; and the villains of that horrid plot were decent, kind, respectable fathers of families, who went to kirk and took the sacrament!

Robert Louis Stevenson, Catriona (1892), pt. I, ch. 20

Justice is a gift

"Properly conceived, justice is not solely the product of governmental institutions, procedures and actions – the grist of laws and lawsuits. Justice is a gift that good people give to each other by the way they treat one another at all times and places, in and out of the courtroom.”

Roger C. Cramton, "Spaulding v. Zimmerman: Confidentiality and Its Exceptions," in Legal Ethics Stories 175, 178 (Deborah L. Rhode & David Luban eds. 2006)