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May 18, 2009

I'd heard Japanese justice was messed up, but wow

It seems the Japanese are growing tired of a prosecutors and police with the sole power to bring cases to trial. They are adding jury like systems to their criminal justice system so that citizens will be able to conduct grand jury like investigations and indictments.

None to soon it seems. Either the Japanese are bringing too few trials to court or they arebuilding illegitimate cases with false confessions. Take a look at these statistics.

Japan’s district courts had a conviction rate of 99.7 percent in 2006, the latest figures available, according to Japan’s Ministry of Internal Affairs. That compares with a 2007 rate of 89.7 percent in the U.S. and 81.3 percent in the UK, according to the U.S. Administrative Office of the Courts and the UK’s Ministry of Justice.

Japan’s judicial system has a presumption of guilt and relies too much on confessions obtained during weeks of police interrogation, human rights group Amnesty International says.

Of course, plea bargains play a huge role in American justice, and perhaps it would be better to count them as people who thought they'd lose in court anyway. If you count those as certain convictions, then since more than 90 percent of criminal convictions come from negotiated pleas, the real American rate would be more like 98.7% (89.7% * 10% + 90% * 100%), which is close to the Japanese rate. I wonder if plea bargaining is common in other countries.

Posted by OneEyedMan at May 18, 2009 1:11 PM

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