Page 19 of 42 103 Minn. L. Rev. 844, *882 [*883] This is a stark contrast with European justice systems, but U.S. jurisdictions are not alone in shielding prosecution decisions from judicial oversight. Aside from England and Wales, courts in other common law jurisdictions - notably Canada and Australia - take roughly the same approach and defer to prosecutorial charging discretion. !7° 5. Summary of Declination Oversight Both private prosecution and review procedures provide a kind of redundancy that checks prosecutorial declination decisions, and both can do so in service of public interests as well as victims’ private interests. Both options have some capacity to challenge prosecutorial judgments affected by political or personal biases, institutional allegiances (especially between police and local politicians), or other illicit sources of favor or disfavor. As one commentator put it in the English context, private prosecution authority recognizes that victims possess some capacity to be independent "assessors of the evidence as well as the public interest." !2? Review procedures enable judges and supervisory [*884] officials to do much the same thing, without the cost barriers for victims posed by private prosecutions. (Although it may well be that poorer victims are less likely even to petition for review, especially if they lack legal counsel to press their review requests.) Why, then, have U.S. jurisdictions so uniformly rejected both options? As noted, both racial politics and the power of common law tradition are probable contributing reasons. !3° Another is the singular choice of most state justice systems to make prosecutors locally elected officials, which does much to prevent kinds of over-and underenforcement disfavored by local majorities. That, in turn, likely reduces pressure for reforms that would improve other safeguards against decisions not to prosecute - especially decisions that cut against popular local preferences, which in many communit