Rudy Giuliani Quotes

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.

Well, I always say the law was meant to be interpreted in a lenient manner. And that's what I try to do, is sometimes I lean to one side of it, sometimes I lean to the other.

One thing I know from personal experience, judges hate it when parties talk publicly about their cases. There are a lot of things about our criminal legal system that need to be changed, and this is just one of them. Prosecutors know how to play the press. Most defendants don't.

The work of deciding cases goes on every day in hundreds of courts throughout the land. Any judge, one might suppose, would find it easy to describe the process which he had followed a thousand times and more. Nothing could be farther from the truth.

When I was a prosecutor in San Francisco I would get advice on trying cases from public defenders and defense attorneys.

Defendants are being evaluated based on numerical grid without any aggravating circumstances being considered. The effect has been to transfer the disparity from the judge to the prosecutor allowing for a great deal of leeway on indictments.

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

The court has to decide which of our approved desires has the better claim, right here, right now, and a court has to do more than read fairly when it makes this kind of choice.

Reaching a conclusion has to start with what the parties are arguing, but examining in all situations carefully the facts as they prove them or not prove them, the record as they create it, and then making a decision that is limited to what the law says on the facts before the judge.

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.

Federal criminal prosecutions are a direct function of the number of U. S. Attorneys. The more prosecutors that are appointed, the more criminal prosecutions there will be.

Plea Bargaining rests on the constitutional fiction that our government does not retaliate against individuals who wish to exercise their right to trial by jury.

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

The state in commissioning its judges has commanded them to judge, but neither in constitution nor in statute has it formulated a code to define the manner of their judging.

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.

A judge sometimes must release a criminal. He doesn't like it, she doesn't like it, but the law requires it. And the context of an election in which you are "soft on crime" betrays a misunderstanding of the judicial process and a misunderstanding of the Constitution.

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.

The role of the federal prosecutor and the purpose of a criminal investigation are well-defined.

Ask any lawyer - if a prosecutor thinks he can win a case, he'll prosecute it.

In San Francisco, I am proud to say that one of my first mandates as district attorney was that my staff would never ask the court to impose money bail. If we believe someone is too dangerous to be released, then it doesn't matter how wealthy they are - we should ask the court to detain them.

Electing radical reformers as district attorneys is huge. It's essential.

A judge is supposed to be able to make a decision, and when you make a decision, very often one party - and very often both - are a little disappointed.

I'm not the kind of judge where you get away with everything, because I know my basics. But I'm the judge where, if you emotionally capture me, then you've got me, I'm in your team.