Daily Inspiration Quote by Norman Lamm

Lamm reaches for Maimonides to do two things at once: elevate a modern legal cause into a moral tradition, and pressure the listener into choosing a side. By invoking the medieval rabbinic giant, he frames wrongful conviction not as a technocratic glitch in the justice system but as a spiritual and civilizational failure. The line is a deliberate rebuke to the popular appetite for certainty and punishment: if you value order over innocence, you are not merely tough on crime, you are out of step with an ethical lineage that treats human life as irretrievable.

The “10 criminals” formulation is rhetorically slick because it forces an uncomfortable trade-off into public view. It admits risk. It concedes that protecting the innocent can mean tolerating some guilt. That candor is the point: Lamm is inoculating the Innocence Project against the usual critique that it’s “soft” or “naive.” The subtext is that a system obsessed with convictions is already gambling with lives; he simply wants the bet placed where a moral society places it.

Context matters: Lamm, a prominent Jewish educator, is speaking from within a tradition deeply preoccupied with due process, evidence, and the sanctity of life. Linking Maimonides to the Innocence Project also bridges faith language and secular reform, translating an ancient legal-ethical sensibility into a contemporary campaign against DNA-era miscarriages of justice. It’s not just advocacy; it’s a claim about what justice is for.