Anthony Kennedy Quotes

It’s a political process to get to be a United States Attorney but after that, politicians have to adopt a hands off approach to the U. S. Attorneys.

Why do we have U.S. attorneys? Because we need a mechanism to make sure people obey the laws that we pass, for societal reasons.

The experience of being a prosecutor gives us a sort of proctologists view of our society.

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

In the Justice Department, responsibility for overseeing and directing investigations is lodged in the department's prosecutors.

I couldn't become a policeman, so being county prosecutor is the next best thing.

You don't hear TV cops griping because they have to enforce some Draconian law that shouldn't be on the books in the first place, or lamenting vindictive excesses in sentencing. Hollywood, supposedly a frothing cauldron of liberalism, has always been conservative on crime.

The vast majority of A.D.A.s put everything on the line to make sure justice is served. That's what I love about prosecutors and the New York police.

Plea bargaining is a system that is best described as one of condemnation without adjudication. It is a system that replaces trial, which is what our constitution intended, with deals… those deals are coerced. The prosecutor is basically forcing people to waive their rights to jury trial by threatening them with ever greater sanctions if they refuse to plead and instead demand the right to jury trial.

I well understand that the role of Attorney General is to enforce the law as it is, not as I would have it.

The prosecutor has more control over life, liberty, and reputation than any other person in America.

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.

I want there to be a real partnership between the Department of Justice in Washington and U.S. attorneys.

While the FBI carries out investigative work, the responsibility for supervising, directing and ultimately determining the resolution of investigations is solely the province of the Justice Department's prosecutors.

The responsibility of the Department of Justice, when it comes to law enforcement, is to determine whether crimes have been committed and to prosecute those crimes under the principles of federal prosecution.

We shouldn't tell prosecutors to 'pick and choose' what laws to uphold.

There is no more important institution in our country than the Department of Justice.

If the prosecutor is obliged to choose his cases, it follows that he can choose his defendants. Therein is the most dangerous power of the prosecutor: that he will pick people that he thinks he should get, rather than pick cases that need to be prosecuted. With the law books filled with a great assortment of crimes, a prosecutor stands a fair chance of finding at least a technical violation of some act on the part of almost anyone. In such a case, it is not a question of discovering the commission of a crime and then looking for the man who has committed it, it is a question of picking the man and then searching the law books, or putting investigators to work, to pin some offense on him. It is in this realm—in which the prosecutor picks some person whom he dislikes or desires to embarrass, or selects some group of unpopular persons and then looks for an offense, that the greatest danger of abuse of prosecuting power lies. It is here that law enforcement becomes personal, and the real crime becomes that of being unpopular with the predominant or governing group, being attached to the wrong political views, or being personally obnoxious to or in the way of the prosecutor himself.

In the United States, authorities are supposed to investigate crimes and find the people who have committed them.

I will ensure that no criminal will ever get any political protection in my government. If anyone takes law in his hands, he would not be spared.

Prosecutorial misconduct is one of the most detrimental problems in our criminal justice system, because prosecutors are essentially the most powerful actors in our justice system because they set the charges, they basically set up the rules of the game.

Attorneys general, district attorneys, and federal prosecutors have a responsibility to separate their politics from their law enforcement powers.

The lawyers in the Department of Justice have a long and storied tradition of defending the nation's interests and enforcing its laws - all of them, not just selective ones - in a manner worthy of the department's name.

I have long believed that there is no finer group than those who serve in the Department of Justice.

Our justice system allows district attorneys to be charged with the great responsibility of prosecuting the very same police officers they work side-by-side with every day and whose union support they seek when running for reelection.