Hey, Thoughty2 here.
If you think Making a Murderer was shocking, you ain’t seen nothing yet.
It’s estimated that every year in Japan hundreds of people are wrongfully convicted
for crimes they didn’t commit.
Japan is the land of extremes; extreme fashion, extreme food, extreme game shows.
So it only seems right that their jurisdictional system is extreme too and oh boy is it.
Japan boasts an unbelievably high conviction rate of 99.8% compared to America’s 88%.
But take this figure with a pinch of pickled ginger because you won’t believe the lengths
Japanese authorities will go to to keep that figure so high.
Despite Japan being one of the safest places on Earth and the world’s third wealthiest
country, its justice system is full of corruption and believe it or not, psychological torture.
And no they don’t force people to listen to J-Pop for days on end whilst force feeding
shirako to them, don’t Google that.
Suspects are routinely subjected to inhumane questioning to force them to confess to a
crime that they may or or may not have committed, just so that the national conviction rate
can be kept at an impressively high level.
You see, in Japan confessions are believed to be the ultimate form of evidence to prove
a person is guilty.
Whereas other countries rely on more tangible evidence to build a case around, and then
play a game of “who has the more expensive lawyer” in court, so the jury can make a
decision.
Japanese courts have no jury, a defendant’s fate is decided by a panel of judges, it’s
like a really depressing X Factor, in fact, I’m surprised the Japanese haven’t made
a game show out it yet, oh no wait, America beat you to that.
Obviously the verdict is almost always guilty, since police interrogators do everything they
can to forcefully extract a guilty confession out of suspects before it reaches court, whether
they committed the crime or not.
Japanese police have been known to use bizarre methods to extract confessions, one woman
was made to repeatedly shout her confession out of the window, another man was forced
to stomp on the names of his loved ones, by the interrogators grabbing his ankles.
In some kind of twisted game of “do you feel guilty enough yet”.
In most countries such as the UK and USA the police can only hold a suspect for 24 hours
after arrest, but in Japan police can hold suspects for up to 23 days without any evidence.
During this time the suspect is not allowed any outside contact and they aren’t even
allowed access to an attorney until after the police have finished their questioning.
Japanese culture places a lot of pride on one’s family members.
Interrogators use this to their advantage, during a murder trial in 2013 one suspect
said that police interrogators repeatedly told him that his mother wanted him to confess
or he would be sent to bed without dessert, but he couldn’t contact his mother to ask
if she really said this; eventually he confessed to the murder.
He later said he was interrogated non-stop for five consecutive days, both day and night.
He spent 29 years in jail for the murder, which it turned out he didn’t commit, despite
confessing to it; he managed to prove his innocence during a retrial later in his life.
In 2007 in a small town in Western Japan, 13 suspects were accused of rigging an election
via vote-buying.
The suspects were all between 50 and 80 years old.
They were subject to constant interrogations for months leading up to the trial.
Six eventually buckled and signed written confessions, admitting they bought votes with
liquor and cash.
One man died during the trial from stress and another man and his wife tried to kill
themselves, twice, but the police stopped them and arrested them for more questioning.
“Come on now guys you’ve had your fun, we can’t force a confession out of you if
your dead, can we?”
All of the surviving suspects were eventually found guilty in court despite the police having
no evidence except from their confessions.
But later they were all acquitted and a court found that their confessions had been entirely
fabricated.
The judge actually said they had “made confessions in despair while going through marathon questioning”.
In both these cases authorities received absolutely no punishments for their wrongful convictions.
The Japanese legal system has been heavily criticised by human rights organisations for
years, such as the United Nations Human Rights Committee.
The head of Amnesty International in Japan, Makoto Teranaka says the system is highly
corrupt and needs to be reformed.
He insists that suspects are subjected to intense psychological torture and he says
Japan is not a society where you have fair trials.
Things are improving though; some areas of Japan have recently introduced a US-style
jury system.
Although maybe this is not such a good thing after all, currently Japanese citizens do
everything they can to avoid court, but relaxing the system could open the doors for more ridiculous
and unnecessary cases to go to court.
There is definitely an issue with frivolous litigation in America, like when D.C. based
judge Roy Pearson sued his dry cleaner’s for $67 million for losing a pair of his pants.
Yeah I’m serious.
The court ruled in favour of the dry-cleaners, and fined Pearson for wasting the court’s
time.
Pearson totally lost his trousers over the ruling.
Thanks for watching.