Prosecutor Bias Quotes

You may pronounce us guilty a thousand times over but the goddess of the eternal court of history will tear to tatters the brief of the state prosecutor and the sentence of this court.

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.

Prosecutors insist they are mounting a "thorough investigation," which sometimes means thorough and sometimes, historically, has meant long enough to let the fire burn down in an incendiary case. A thorough investigation is fine; an interminable one is disgraceful.

A grand jury hears only one side - that of the prosecutor.

I believe there's a huge conflict of interest when local prosecutors investigate cases of police violence within their own communities.

We should start with the basics: Police officers are unlikely to be held accountable if the prosecutors investigating and potentially prosecuting them feel indebted to them.

We all hope that the police and prosecutors are objective. That's their job, but sometimes it's not true.

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.