Comment by bell-cot
16 days ago
You aren't gonna advance your career as a prosecutor, or even win re-election, if you actually care about that "truth and justice" stuff in the case of some rando out-of stater who you already have a really cool-sounding story about the obvious guilt of.
Democracy is cool and all but perhaps roles like judges and prosecutors should be selected on competence, not by perceived tough-on-crime popular elections
Who does the selection? In the USA, doesn’t it always come down to voter choice one way or another? We typically elect a sheriff but a mayor appoints a police chief. The mayor is elected however. What process could be used to determine process and selection that would avoid voter input?
Open application process. Select whoever had the highest law school grades. Or alternatively make all the applicants take a competitive exam. Anonymous grading.
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Appointment by mayor or local government is fine. Make it a normal public service job. There are reasonable questions about why the US needs quite so many fine-grained local police authorities and who polices the police, though.
Make them fight to the death? Seriously, it would solve sooo many problems.
The highest level public offices should always be either directly elected, or appointed by an elected person for only the duration of their office. This way voters can get rid of them if necessary. Otherwise they become an unelected deep state.
Other levels of public office should be strictly by competence. Meaning by trials open for all citizens.
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having judges and prosecutor elected sure is an american experiment that i'm too european to understand
The UK tried the experiment and gave up: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Police_and_crime_commissioner
They were quite overpaid compared to other local government roles, and had very poor public visibility. WP says they were originally going to be called "sheriffs" but that was rejected as "too American". This does make it clear that it was an attempt to copy the US system, but I feel obliged to point out that the Scottish court system has had Sheriffs for longer than the US has existed.
Does any sheriff have better name recognition than the Sheriff of Nottingham, England?
It's democratic. You don't have much democracy if the population is only allowed to elect some of the powers. Americans elect their sheriffs as well.
Yes, it's democratic. But there's a reason we're not electing doctors and engineers.
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Is that like how european's don't understand not to burn down cities over school employee pensions?
The French are just exercising their second amendment rights as originally envisioned by the founding fathers. They're doing America better than Americans!
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> or even win re-election
I mean, I would like to know what percentage of people makes an informed decision when voting for a judge for example.
A lot of them run unopposed anyway. And if they don't, I have no idea how you would figure out what candidate you like best.
Heck, in the US even the big political positions seem to be largely void of 'ideas'. It's mostly attack ads paid for by shady sources through PACs. That's where the majority of the votes are flipped/won...