SCOTLAND'S senior prosecutors should be elected to office on similar lines to US district attorneys.
Electing the country's 11 area procurators fiscal would create "a far clearer and transparent" system of justice, claimed a think-tank report today.
It also called for prison sentences of less than three months to be scrapped, saying they were "ineffective and expensive and often push offenders towards a career in crime".
The recommendations, which include a call for Scotland's police forces to be reorganised to fit local authority boundaries, came in a report on criminal justice by Reform Scotland.
But its call for elected fiscals is the most radical.
The report said: "Procurators fiscal can make crucial decisions about whether, where and how crimes are prosecuted in Scotland, yet as with the police there is little transparency or accountability to the public within the system."
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