You are under a misapprehension that "naked exercise of personal power" means a judge upholding a law he doesn't like, when actually it means a judge unilaterally choosing not to uphold that law and substituting his own personal opinion instead.
That's not to say that I'm a fan of our current legal system; I'm not. It is highly unfair and does a very poor job of getting justice done. But it's still better than what we would have if everybody could disobey all laws they didn't like with impunity. (If people disobey laws and then take the consequences, that's different--if the judge had refused to impose the sentence required by law, and then had accepted being fired for failing to uphold the law, that would be civil disobedience, and sometimes that's necessary. But that's not what you're advocating, as far as I can tell.)
I am not restricting myself to looking at the role of judges in a vacuum. Prosecutors, police, regulators, etc. all make individual decisions that amount to "I will fuck this guy up, because I don't like them". They typically have absolute immunity in making those decisions - as do judges, actually. It makes no sense to condemn judges for exercising mercy contrary to the law in one breath, and in another give prosecutors absolute immunity for their charging or investigatory decisions, regardless on what basis they were made. We evidently wanted a system where no state actor ever faces punishment for any decision they make, and now we have it.
> We evidently wanted a system where no state actor ever faces punishment for any decision they make
Exactly--which means those actors are not exercising "naked personal power"; they are exercising the power as state actors that we gave to them. So if we don't like what they're doing with it, we need to take it away.
We have sentences for crimes that are way too extreme in many cases because we told lawmakers with our votes that we wanted them to be "tough on crime" and that we wanted them to wage war on drugs. We have prosecutors and cops who have essentially unlimited discretion for the same reasons. We have a legal system that favors the rich because incumbent politicians who favor their rich donors have a re-election rate in the high 90's even though their approval ratings are in the single digits. The system we have is not "naked personal power"; it's the system that we, the voters, voted for. Democracy is working exactly the way it was designed to work. Burning it to the ground would not make it work better; it would make things worse. The way to make it better is to change the incentives of those who make the laws, by telling them different things with our votes.
