The United States is more or less the only advanced democracy that elects its prosecutors. As the legal scholar William Stuntz points out, those electorates often draw from an entire county, which includes urban and suburban areas, so that predominantly white, middle-class-to-affluent suburban voters are choosing who will prosecute the largely poor black people arrested by the police. The idea of electing prosecutors, as we do in the United States, strikes most European jurists as sheer madness. In almost all cases, the continental criminal justice system is far more bureaucratic, more
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