"I hope the sentence will send a strong message that this is a city that cannot stand corruption," said Judge Wendy Beetlestone during a hearing Thursday morning.
She imposed a $17,500 fine and noted that Green had paid $76,581 in forfeiture funds from the sale of his retirement home in Florida that businessman Jim Davis helped finance.
She also gave Green a bit of a scolding.
"You were supposed to be one of the good ones," she said. "The shame, and the shame of the city is, you were not."
Green was first elected Sheriff in 1988, promising to be a reformer, and retired in 2011 under a cloud.
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He and Davis were charged in 2015 with a scheme in which Green gave Davis secret contracts to run Sheriff's sales in exchange for $675,000 in cash and benefits including a job for Green's wife, campaign contributions and $320,000 for the Florida home.
The contracts allowed Davis to collect exorbitant fees from the sale of homes in foreclosure for mortgage default or tax liens, money that would have gone to the owners who were losing their homes.
The scheme lasted from 2002 to 2011, operating throughout the financial crisis that pushed thousands of homeowners into foreclosure.
Davis was sentenced to 10 years in March.
Green was acquitted of three charges at trial and was to be retried on the remaining two in April, but instead agreed to plead guilty to the conspiracy charge.
He uttered just one sentence at the hearing: "I accept full responsibility for my actions, your honor, and I'm sorry."
His attorney, Peter Scuderi, made an unusually weak request for leniency, acknowledging there was no legal rationale for seeking a reduction.
"I couldn't even invent one," Scuderi said.
He noted that he normally begins sentencing hearings by thanking those who wrote letters on behalf of the defendant and pointing to the family and friends in the courtroom for support. But, he said, Green requested no letters or other support.
"He didn't want to put anyone in a position of having to drive down here to say something positive about him," Scuderi said, though he asked the judge to decrease the sentence, "really just to give him a little bit of a break."
Prosecutor Sarah Grieb, on the other hand, made a passionate argument for the maximum.
"There are public officials out there listening," she said, "those who are honest and disenchanted and those who are thinking about being corrupt. They're wondering: what are the consequences?"
A serious sentence, she said, would show there were serious consequences.
Grieb praised the sentence afterward.
"This is an appropriate sentence," she said. "The message needs to be sent to other politicians, other government employees, other potential vendors out there that corruption and bribes and kickbacks are not tolerated."
Beetlestone lamented the impact of Green's behavior on the city.
"The kind of corruption demonstrated in the trial is insidious," the judge said. "There was a loss of trust as well as the loss to the homeowners. Here, in one of the greatest cities in the world, those who are corrupt is the rot at its core."