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Quote by Alice Vachss

“The victims I’ve worked with taught me that individuals want to believe they are entitled to justice. My community taught me that when the choice is clear-cut enough, so do entire counties. We have become profoundly discouraged about whether we have such choices. My own experience is that we do, if we are willing to pay the price. We need better data to make decisions based on performance, but getting that data is a matter of passing the right laws requiring crunchable statistics and mandatory public reports. The rest is on us. If Tip O’Neil was right, if all politics is local, then our local district attorneys are the place to start. Crime is local. What we do about it is as close as the nearest voting booth.”

Quote by Alice Vachss

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Alice Vachss

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“The other amazing thing about prosecution that prosecutors don't realize while they are in the job is the time they have available to them as opposed to lawyers in the private practice of law. Prosecutors have an incredible amount of time to sit with one another around their offices and talk. Talk about war stories. Talk about this or that cop. Talk about the case. That's what floored me the most when I got out of it - how much free time I'd had and didn't realize it.”

“It's kind of funny to me listening to people who claim to have these great records of winning a hundred and some odd straight felony cases without a loss and that kind of stuff that you hear all the time. I'm here to tell you, if you let me pick out which hundred cases I get to try, I'll win a hundred of them in a row, too. Case selection is everything in creating records like that. My philosophy was, I tried them all. If I made a determination that the evidence was sufficient to justify the prosecution, then I would try the case, and certainly whenever you do that, you're going to lose a certain percentage of them.”

“Call me cynical, call me cold-hearted, but I don't believe in just knowing and love at first sight. I just don't believe that's love. Love is knowing someone's flaws, habits and pet peeves; having to deal with their grumbling after a bad day; the weird quirks that only surface after several months of being together; living with their morning breath and farts. It's not that gushy, obsessive, in-the-moment feeling. That's a crush. And sure, they can hurt, but you'll get over them. It's not destiny.”