I assume Comfed meant it was quicker to appoint THOs than prosecutors, and mixed up the wording. Because the THO process was quick and easy, unless I’m missing something from your argument? Anyway not that important.
Prosecutors are appointed the way they are because there was a lot of concern expressed at the time that the delegate could just hand pick prosecutors and get out of trouble in the event the delegate is the subject of the court action. The appointment process is meant to be a check against that, as well as a substitute for the voter input that was lost as a result of ending the election. It can take a while but as Bootsie pointed out, it can also be quick. That depends entirely on the Speaker and the RA. I would posit that the court process is slow to a decent extent no matter what part of it you’re thinking of. I also think that’s a feature, not a bug, even if it does annoy us to some extent. I don’t know how to shorten this legislatively without tying the RA’s flexibility to an unacceptable extent. Could we just appoint prosecutors like other offices with delegate discretion? Yeah but I have a feeling that will be distasteful to most. It would be faster though!
I would say that in terms of performance, our prosecutors have been decent for the most part, but individual pitfalls in each case can still make things go sideways. And sometimes the fault squarely lies with the prosecutor - but that was also a risk with the AG, and is also an existing risk with any office that someone occupies - people make mistakes and court stuff can be tricky. Outcomes vary when the person prosecuting the case varies, though, and I believe we have more variety because we’re not electing the same couple of people who decide to seek the AG position and get re-elected because we don’t have many takers for the office. We could also have that variety if we had the bar system that’s been proposed time and again. I have a few ideas of what that might look like.
People interested in possibly prosecuting cases would apply to the Court, which would then administer an exam testing them on TNP law and precedent. The individuals passing the exam would be admitted to the TNP bar. When a case comes up requiring a prosecutor, the existing bar-qualified individuals would be informed and confirm their availability. Of those available, any with a conflict would be conflicted out and those remaining would be the people to choose from. Conflicts can be challenged through the existing legal process if any litigants feel a conflict exists with the prosecutor. As to which prosecutor gets the case, we can have them just agree by consensus, have the Court pick, or make it random. It shouldn’t matter because these are bar-qualified individuals. Obvious drawback here is that we’re entirely dependent on a test administered and written by the Court, and there’s no RA input. But this to me falls under the importance of electing the right people, and I would observe that the AG made calls once in office. Of course, if they made calls you didn’t like, you could punish them through recall or in the next election. The bar exam may be a tad removed from the Court so it’s not quite the same thing.
My other idea is essentially the same system, but adds confirmation to it. The delegate doesn’t have any say in this process - the RA would simply need to confirm all bar-qualified individuals to be in the prosecutor pool. We would still need to adjudicate how prosecutors get assigned to cases. But this would make the process independent from cases so the length isn’t as important. I don’t know that the confirmation part is necessary though. You could also do this without the bar exam - have the delegate make a handful of picks periodically and they’re all confirmed and sit in the pool ready to be picked. Make the pool expire after 6 months so it has to be refreshed. This model basically imitates the EC, but without the independence and rule making authority the ECs have.
This wont surprise anyone I’m sure, but I personally don’t believe we need the AG. I think the change we made almost two years ago in removing that office eliminated a position that largely had nothing substantial or productive to do and was only needed and useful in very specific circumstances. To the extent it was useful even in those situations, the utility was entirely dependent on the quality of the individual in the office. Quality of officeholders naturally varies in any office, and sometimes we get someone good and sometimes we get someone less good, let’s say. But if you evaluated hits and misses, we missed far, far more often than we hit with the AG, and we had to cling to an increasingly small number of people who even bothered to pursue the office or take it seriously. The legal jobs in this region lend themselves to reactionary work and there’s a lot of downtime compared to the other offices. And yet, in those brief times we use them, those offices are crucial and incredibly reliant on higher skill people. It’s a screwedup balance and I think it’s why in other places in this game, let alone the real world, these are not elected offices.
The main criticism I’m interested in weighing has to do with standing. The AG had universal standing to ask questions on legal matters, and we have nothing like that now. I would argue we may not need that, because there may be fixes we can look at that aren’t being utilized now. From my position as a court justice, I’m looking at the r4r template and seeing if maybe we’re a tad too restrictive in its use. Fixing this legislatively would require some finesse, but it’s something I’m willing to look at too. Going into this, I will say that it seems obvious to me that if someone wants to call into question a law or policy, it should be clear how it affects them, and the question of standing is an important aspect of the legal system that we emulate here. In the event we fix this legislatively, I think the question to ask is not standing, but in clarifying the kinds of questions that can be posed with the r4r. But I’ll get my thoughts together on that as I get further in the review I’m working on with the Court.
Bottom line for me: I think the AGORA Act was a good move, but creating a new system can lead to some challenges and the work must continue. I don’t believe that these problems are unsolvable and they certainly don’t mean this effort was a failure. It would take more than these to convince me we have to go back to what we had before, because the problems we have are related to the change. Bringing back the old problems we wanted to solve - and did - isn’t the way to resolve them.
