Until Japan adopted a jury system (with members called “lay judges”), it had a conviction rate in the upper 90 percentages with trials being conducted by judges only.
That’s insane. Essentially, the prosecutor was replacing the jury in determining guilt. If the prosecutor thought a person was guilty, they would take it to trial, with judges rubber stamping the decision. Many people were unjustly convicted only on the basis of forced confessions. Many people charged with lesser crimes would face enormous pressure to “settle” with the victim, paying them off in return for dropped charges.
In face of pressure from human rights groups, just this last year Japan has introduced a system with lay members. We’ll have to wait to see if this will help relieve part of the abysmal state of Japanese justice. For now, the jury is still out.
Mild nit-pick: Japan is not using a jury system - it has six ‘lay judges’ and three ‘professoinal judges’ - and the three judges can over-ride the verdict of the lay judges.
Only in Japan could this kind of sweeping change to its judicial system by introduced with zero input from the populace at large.
The lay judges have to be over the age of 20, and have to have completed secondary education (which, now that I think about it, probably isn’t a bad requirement…). Lay judges are allowed to directly question the defendant - I’m still torn as to whether this is a good idea or not.
I’m very happy to see this system introduced in Japan, however - Japan’s judicial system is positively ancient in how it operates, from the glacial speed at which cases proceed, to how Japan’s existing lawyers actively work to restrict the number of new lawyers coming into the system, to the implicit and explicit cooperation between the police and prosecutors, to the refusal of the police to video tape interrogations/confessions, to the widely-held believe that someone not confessing to a crime isn’t ‘not guilty’, but ‘guilty and not contrite’, and thus should be subject to an even harsher punishment. Check out a movie, ‘Soredemo boku wa yattenai’ (I Just Didn’t Do It), to see an all-too-real picture of how Japan’s judicial system works.
To Pleonast, I work in Australia, but I also teach in Malaysia, which has a judge-only system with English DNA.
And to AK84, I too like doing jury trials.
My point about judge shopping is not that it doesn’t happen anyway, but that pleas of guilty or not will skew the statistics, making them unreliable indicators of the outcome. I am unconvinced that a hanging judge will have his verdicts shot to bits, as you say. Experience suggests that judges become adept at appeal proofing - saying the right things, articulating the tests correctly but doing what they want. Judges at the other end of the spectrum do that too. Fact finding is hard to overturn on appeal, remember.
My point about women and children was not that they are more unreliable than others. It was that judges can develop a micro-culture in which such silliness can become elevated to the level of received wisdom, and I was using that as an example.
And finally I agree that conviction rates are a poor measure of the success of the system for the reasons I mentioned in my post above - second guessing by counsel including prosecutors distorts the meaning of the numbers. The same is true of numbers of cases taken to trial.
And I have to add, having talked to lawyers who have worked in Japan, that system is too weird for me to even think about commenting on. The role of the prosecutor in getting confessions, the power they have - it just has too many pointy bits to fit comfortably inside my head.