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Edit: I just realized that the nearly 100% conviction rate is only for those who go to trial. A third of the people who are detained are released without trial.
by _cs2017_ 7y ago
Edit: I just realized that the nearly 100% conviction rate is only for those who go to trial. A third of the people who are detained are released without trial. So ignore this post: my main assumption (that arrest is similar to conviction) was incorrect.
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Maybe one way to think of the Japanese justice system is that the trial happens before the defendant is arrested. After all, the conviction rate is nearly 100%, so in some sense the actual trial is just a formality. From that perspective, it's not surprising that defendants may be detained without bail for weeks: the system treats them as if they are already convicted.
It seems to me that with such a system, it's far too easy to convict an innocent person: after all, the decision is made by prosecutors, who are usually incentivized to err on the side of conviction (both by career pressures and by personal predisposition).
Do we know whether Japan has a really high false conviction rate? It's probably very hard to answer, since it's unclear how anyone could collect such statistics.
If it turns out that false convictions are rare in Japan, it may imply the prosecutors are actually trying to discover the truth rather than convict. Which would be a very interesting deviation from any other justice system I know of.
- b_tterc_p 7y agoIt’s mostly because their system is underfunded so they don’t bother going to court unless a win is guaranteed.
- Causality1 7y agoLike much of Japanese society, appearances and propriety are very important. Sometimes that means releasing criminals who might not be found guilty. Sometimes it means homicides get declared suicides.
- ansible 7y agoYears and years ago I traveled to Japan. It seemed like a very safe place. I had heard about crime in Japan, and the year before had (allegedly) less than 100 murders for the entire country, which puts the murder rate far, far below the rest of the world. And these days when I read about how criminal justice works there... well, I'm glad I'm not as naive as I used to be.
- pas 7y agoIt's a case of both. Japan is incredibly safe, no questions about that. At the same time they have a very severe problem with managing expectations and facing the sometimes inevitable less than perfect results of reality.
- novok 7y agoSomewhere being safe is a combination of police focusing on a basic set of crimes that happen in the public and poverty.
- JoeAltmaier 7y agoOh yeah. Used to be they had 'hanging parks' where folks who owed money and couldn't pay would go to 'hang themselves'. Except they had help (from Yakuza etc). So add up 'homicide' and 'self-harm' mortality statistics and you might get a truer story.