Harold H. Greene Quotes

Mandatory sentencing guidelines have become as complicated and detailed as the IRS code!

Prosecutorial charging and plea bargaining discretion, jury discretion to convict of one or another amorphously distinguished capital or non-capital crime, and gubernatorial discretion to grant or withhold clemency are all equally uncontrolled and uncontrollable.

We cannot and should not repeal Article 17. We have to allow for the individualization of punishment and we have to take into consideration the emotional state of the perpetrator when he committed the crime. This prerogative is given to judges in the West as well.

These people have served a longer sentence than some people who have committed murder.

If we believe in our current penal process, then the penalties imposed by judges and juries should be the only sanctions for one's crime, not the invisible sanctions of the legislature.

The higher someone's profile, the easier it is for a defendant to trade him up to the feds. Mr. Big is always a better catch than Mr. Small.

Now, I - for several years while I was researching this book, I felt quite obsessed by thoughts about sentencing, punishment, how judges arrive at their decisions.

If you're dealing with criminals, they're not going to want to go to court.

The purpose of a jury is to guard against the exercise of arbitrary power—to make available the commonsense judgment of the community as a hedge against the over- zealous or mistaken prosecutor and in preference to the professional or perhaps overconditioned or biased response of a judge.

We have far more plea bargains in our system than we do trials.

The justice system is confused in trying to understand it, but frankly, if it paid attention to the really blatant cases and did a good job with that, we would be light years ahead of where we are now.

America today is becoming a Prosecutocracy. Prosecutors have the power when over 97 percent of the convictions are without trial.

Thousands of people plead guilty to crimes every year in the United States because they know that the odds of a jury's believing their word over a police officer's are slim to none.

As a former prosecutor, I never presented a case in front of the grand jury that didn't result in an indictment. Bottom line: If a prosecutor wants to indict a case, the case gets indicted.

I am deeply impressed with the gravity and wisdom with which most federal judges approach the responsibility of sentencing. It is a difficult, soul-searching task at best.

I love doing bank robberies, drug cases, homicides - as a prosecutor, that's what I thought I was going to be overseeing when I got to the bureau.

Circumstances of crimes vary. So do motives. And so do prospects for rehabilitation. The number of imponderables makes it impossible to sentence by formula and still sentence justly.

When you talk about mandatory minimums, it created a lot of unfairness in our sentencing.

He was a first-time nonviolent possible offender, ... And under the mandatory minimums, he was put in prison for 15 years. Not only does the punishment not fit the crime, but the mandatory minimums don't give judges any discretion to look at the background of the case, to read into the specifics of the case. I don't know a judge who really is in favor of the mandatory minimums.

I believe having judges with real world, frontline experience as a prosecutor is a good thing.

It is a core principle that prosecutors should charge and pursue the most serious readily provable offense.

I understood that with the swipe of my pen as a prosecutor, I would have the decision in my pen to make a decision about someone's life.

More than 90 percent of criminal cases are never tried before a jury. Most people charged with crimes forfeit their constitutional rights and plead guilty.

I believe indeterminate sentencing can be extremely useful, but I also believe that any such system should always take into consideration the special knowledge as to the facts in a case which only the trial judge possesses.

We need criminal justice reform. You have heard people talk about that all over the country. I was able to work on that specific issue at home.