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Comment by s1artibartfast | Hacker News Reader

Are you prepared to give several Trump appointed judges prosecutorial discretion over who can run in the midterms and 2028?

The problem that prosecutorial discretion will have to overcome is selective enforcement, or the perception thereof. The right wing European media is claiming this was common practice across parties. Now I don't know the truth of it, but it is a hard thought to get out of ones head, and a hard negative to prove.

wrt Le Pen, I find it noteworthy that evey English news article I have read avoids describing the actual crime [1], Which does seem more substantial than 99% of the Trump cases.

https://www.lemonde.fr/en/les-decodeurs/article/2024/09/30/w...

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This works differently in France. Americans need to stop comparing everything to their own country, your country not as great a democracy as you might think.

I'm mostly talking about the US, and not claiming it is great.

That said, in what ways do you think France is different?

Accounting politicians for crimes is not a problem as long as the judicial system is sufficiently independent from the executive. It is my impression that the French justice system is more independent and better protected against the executive branch than the US justice system, but I admit that I'm not an expert on comparing the two systems and could be wrong. It's really just a hunch aggregated from what I've heard over the years.

I don't know about France, but in the US, the prosecution falls under the executive, while the judges are independent.

This means the POTUS can decide who gets investigated and charged for a crime, and who doesn't get investigated and who gets charges dropped.

The executive can investigate its enemies, and ignore or drop charges for its friends.

It is looks very similar in France and in the US to some extent. I copy a post I made somewhere in this thread as I think it can help here:

Prosecutors are formally under executive control but since 2013 the justice minister should not give orders on individual cases.

France has an additional layer of independence compared to the U.S. because of the juge d’instruction (investigating judge), who is supposed to be independent from the executive like the courts judges, unlike prosecutors.

I say in principle because judges are appointed in France and not elected (similarly to federal judge in the US from what I understood). The executive as some control through appointments and career advancements but they are not supposed to use it to sanction or reward the judges.

The effectiveness of these independence mechanisms remains a subject of active debate, as evidenced by the relatively recent changes made to them.

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