Ex-President Sarkozy Gets Jail Sentence for Corruption in France

There are two obvious risks:

1. The system may be used as a political weapon. I.e. the president may be used as a scapegoat for something, or be framed.

2. Fearing #1 or fearing legitimate prosecution, the president may try to illegitimately hold on to power.

Both definitely happen in various countries.

>So if you're a corrupt politician, managing to become president should be a "get out of jail free card"?

Yes. In fact, the US constitution explicitly allows this via pardoning. Sending presidents to jail has rarely ever worked out well in history. It becomes an inherently political power struggle, and weaponizes the justice system for political purposes.

Anything short of cold blooded murder can be twisted and skewed into something either worse or not as bad as it actually is, depending on your political leaning. And like it or not, we have to share this country with 50% of the population who disagree with us politically. The alternative is disenfranchisement and civil unrest.

There are several I can think of off hand.

1) Political debate can be thwarted by legal charges. Imagine if some of the politicians who supported Rosa Parks were indicted as co-conspirators in bus rule evasion. It's kind of a silly idea, but only because of tradition. The reality is that many people pushing for political change are asking for legal relief from laws. In other words, they want to do what's forbidden. That sounds like they want to break the laws.

2) It discourages people from leaving office because they're afraid they'll be jailed once they leave.

Class solidarity between criminals and would-be criminals.

From my point of view the root problem is "Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?" It is often difficult to evaluate the veracity of claims of one custodian about another. In the US the relatively short terms of office mean that the evaluation is performed by voters on a regular schedule and the loose coupling of legal directives to actual population behavior means that a large component of cooperation is based on the prestige of the director.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quis_custodiet_ipsos_custodes%...

>What reason?

Democracy is a tenuous proposition. It requires an overwhelming majority of the population to buy into the legitimacy of a government, and remain loyal to its' institutions. There's a reason Lincoln ordered not a single Confederate general or politician to be hung after the civil war. The long term strength of the union takes precedent over short term political vendettas.

that's not a very sofisticated joke is it? Is it a joke to you?

At least he's being recognized as guilty. Socially its way better than evading any consequences or getting a bogus sentence like case dismissal because some formality mistake.

It's stopping him from being a candidate for the next elections at least.

Not great but I'll take that.

> The only messages being given are that if you've made it to the top you can go to your death bed having done anything without seeing a prison cell

In the case of Christine Lagarde this was actually made explicit. She was found guilty but not punished, because she was too important: "but given the circumstances, given the responsibilities that Ms. Lagarde had at the time — in 2008, we were in a major economic crisis — the court decided that it would not sentence Ms. Lagarde to anything" [1].

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/19/business/imf-trial-christ...

I agree with you and this is quite common knowledge in France. However when was the last time a crime committed by a high ranking politician in the western world really punished?

Sarcozy took money from Gaddafi and literally bombed him after that. When France supposedly ran out of ammunition they start dropping concrete from planes over Libya. (https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2011/04/fr...)

Plenty of people owed money to Gaddafi and when they couldn't repay it was time to dispose him off.

Luxury house arrest anklets - the unicorn startup we deserve, not the one we need.

Where I am, you are a first time offender if you have no previous record, or your previous records were expunged (which happens after enough time has passed from the completion of the sentence, unless it was for terrorism, war crimes, genocide etc.).

That does not mean that you won't ever get a custodial sentence - for crimes severe enough you surely will - but the benefit of having no prior record still applies to you.