Page 14 of 42 103 Minn. L. Rev. 844, *871 prosecutions as fulfilling the same structural purpose. Allowing private actors to begin prosecutions meets "the need for a system of checks and balances on the office of the district attorney" and "constitutes a recognition by the legislature that the office of the district attorney should be subject to a system of checks and balances." °! The rarity of private charges in jurisdictions that authorize them hardly justifies their abolition. Private prosecutions should be rare in well-functioning public prosecution systems, because public agencies pursue most provable cases and because private actors must bear considerable costs to press charges themselves. Moreover, other rules and institutions - including other safeguards on prosecutorial charging - endure despite few indications of their utility. There has never been a successful claim that a criminal charge violated the Equal Protection prohibition on racially biased charging, °” but few argue the doctrine lacks at least normative value. °° Grand juries rarely reject prosecutors’ [*872] charging requests for indictments, but courts continue to tout them as a structural check on prosecutors. °+ Like private prosecution, these safeguards may work by deterring biased or ill-conceived prosecutorial decisions; their efficacy 1s probably impossible to measure. A contributing explanation for the U.S. aversion to private prosecution may lie mn a familiar theme of U.S. law and history: race. During the first several decades of the nineteenth century, when private citizens could prosecute crimes, many states - and not only Southern ones - either denied African Americans legal capacity as litigants °° or barred them from testifying under oath on the basis of race. Among other effects, those barriers barred private prosecutions by African Americans. °° After 1865 - an era in which rights to litigate and testify were viewed by many as more meaningful than the right to vote ?’ - those r