About 25 correspondents from various news organizations were in attendance for my talk "Japan's New Jury System: Important Consequences for Asia." I had invited as my guest a prominent judge. We both expected that he would sit in the audience, but the talk's organizers suggested he sit with me at the dais. This was a good move. After my talk, the reporters had many questions. Although the judge originally expected to be a guest, he graciously agreed to help me answer the reporters' questions. Indeed, he was the real authority in the room.
One Japanese participant said that bringing back a jury system in Japan would be useless because current police practices -- including prolonged detention of suspects and forced confessions -- would defeat the reforms. I noted that the new system may actually lead to reforms in police practices. In cases of confessions, police officers will now have to come to court and explain to ordinary citizens the circumstances in which the police extracted the confession. In addition, there seems to be a growing feeling in Japan that in in order to present confessions to lay people, the confessions should be videotaped. Videotaped confessions would be a huge reform -- one that, alas, has not been implemented in most jurisdictions in the U.S.
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