In response to Professor Makato Ibusuki Asahi Shimbun op-ed proposing measures to curb the use of forced confessions in Japan, jury scholar Hiroshi Fukurai wrote me:
There will be a fifth way to prevent the use of forced confessions in criminal court, that is, to establish the effective system of lay participation in legal decision making, i.e., I am talking about Japan's new saiban-in system. Based on surveys from Japan's grand jurors (i.e., prosecutorial review commission members, whose duty is to review and assess the appropriateness of prosecutors' non-indictment decision) and Dallas residents who served in jury trials, I found that, when defendants dispute "confession" documents in open courts, more than 90% of those citizens showed a strong interest in knowing how confessions are made and recorded, and more than 70% of them also said that they are more likely to believe the defendants' arguments that confessions were forced rather than prosecutorial evidence.
The extent of judges' influence on lay judges is still unknown, however, it is clear that lay judges are more likely than professional judges to question the voluntariness or believability of "confessions" made by defendants. As survey findings indicate, they are also more likely to believe defendants' testimony over written confession records.
Comments