Professor David Sklansky weighs in on a suggestion to appoint independent prosecutors in cases against police officers for The San Francisco Chronicle.

The furor over the non-indictments of white police officers for killing unarmed black men in Missouri and New York has led to widespread calls for states to take such cases away from local district attorneys, who work with police every day and often depend on their support for re-election.

“You absolutely need independent prosecutors,” said Barbara Arnwine, president of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights.

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Minsker said any elected official, including the attorney general, faces a potential conflict of interest in such cases. But Stanford law Professor David Sklansky, a former federal prosecutor, said police prosecutions should be handled by the attorney general’s office, noting that the California Constitution authorizes the attorney general to intervene whenever she concludes a district attorney is failing to enforce state law.

In federal cases, he said, a Watergate-era law, now expired, allowed the government to appoint an independent counsel to investigate high-ranking officials. Experience with that law was “not encouraging,” Sklansky said, and the Justice Department now appoints its own special prosecutors for cases beyond the scope of a U.S. attorney’s office.