it's possible for a candidate to run from prison in Westminster-style parliamentary systems. The fact that a candidate is imprisoned should not inhibit the electors from expressing their choice. Though once elected, they face certain practical barriers to assuming office.
For example, the IRA member Bobby Sands was elected to the UK parliament while in prison during his (subsequently fatal) hunger strike. Parliament then immediately passed a law banning people from running for parliament from jail.
Of course, the UK is a monarchy, not a republic, so its relevance to the subject at hand is somewhat dubious.
>> The UK is only a monarchy at the ceremonial level.
This is a common claim, but I can't say that I agree. The House of Lords holds real power, as does the king in his role as head of state. The UK is not an absolute monarchy by any means, but the king is far more than just a figurehead [1].
One can only hope Charles disbands parliament and puts it to the test. For once I hope the fear mongers at the Guardian are right, but I suspect that I am, sadly.
- "Though once elected, they face certain practical barriers to assuming office"
Then they're democratic in name only. If the previous leader has the effective, practical ability to fuck with the transfer of power, it ain't democracy.
It’s not clear to me why one ostensibly democratic mechanism (the criminal justice system) should automatically be overridden by other ostensibly democratic mechanism (an election).
It seems pretty clearly undemocratic to me to say that you get out of jail if you win an election (or that the justice system somehow applies less to you if you’re an elected official).
One's direct and one's second-order indirect. It'd be like the bash shell saying you can't do something as sudo because a config file you edited last year overrules it.
- "But running and/or winning shouldn't get them out either.
"
Then you're disenfranchising the majority of democratic voters, millions of citizens, in preference of ossifying so-called criminal justice against a mere one human. Why would you do that? What hallowed value does that serve?
The question of what's a crime and what's valid is a democratic question fundamentally, and is and should be mutable.
We're in this thread, remember, because pretentious ideologues once imprisoned an anti-war protestor for bullshit reasons that were framed as "crimes".
> what's a crime and what's valid is a democratic question fundamentally, and is and should be mutable
Sure, and the question of the legality of a given action can also be on the ballot. Implying that someone who wins an election should automatically get out of jail is nonsense. One of the pillars of the bureaucratic rule of law is making it so that no individual has autocratic power. We already have too much of powerful politicians and other agents of the state being effectively above the law.
I'm philosophizing above my pay grade, probably, but winning a majority of votes seems to me like the *opposite* of "autocratic power".
If anything, to me, "convicted criminal winning an election by majority vote" strongly pattern-matches "effective check against autocracy". Again: look at what the OP is, what fact patterns we're discussing in this thread!
> winning a majority of votes seems to me like the opposite of "autocratic power"
No it's not. The two concepts are orthogonal, and treating them as a single quality is a dangerous fallacy. The first is about how someone gets elected to an office - one of the cornerstones of our society is that leaders are elected by the people. The second is what someone in an office can legally do once they are there - another cornerstone is that nobody is above the rule of law. Equating the two effectively throws out the latter.
The distinction is very clear when it comes to a narrowly-scoped office, or even a general executive at a low level like the mayor of a city. It only gets fuzzier as you go up in scale, as those charged with enforcing the law are better poised to not enforce against themselves. But the proper term for that is "corruption".
