This isn't very constructive, FWIW. If you say it's unacceptable, but can't define acceptable except as "not this", it's kind of worthless. Why is a single per

This isn't very constructive, FWIW. If you say it's unacceptable, but can't define acceptable except as "not this", it's kind of worthless. Why is a single person better/worse than a group? Do you have any evidence to back it up? There are all sorts of tradeoffs involved in how this sort of thing is done, and why, and those tradeoffs have evolved over thousands of years of legal systems existing. In this case, the common tradeoff is that this is an elected official who is accountable to voters for the decisions they make. There are states where they are appointed. There are states which require grand juries. All of these have tradeoffs - there is no "best", nor do statistics say that any of them end up any more fundamentally fair than each other. Nor do any of them have a significantly different rate of indicting objectively or subjectively innocent people (last i looked). It's unclear exactly what you think a system should look like - i would argue any system with sufficient safeguards is not going to look very different than a preliminary hearing anyway. Particularly your complaint about the stress/loss/etc seems unavoidable. That occurs starting with when people are investigated in the first place.