Why Every Japanese Criminal is Guilty

[The Lawspeaker]

Every system of justice is inevitably found to be unjust. The question is in which direction, and how far. This is a fairly basic outline of Japan's idiosyncratic nature. Sort of an easy week for me. Hope you like it!

[Daco Celtic]

I'm always on my best behavior in Japan. Not a good place to do stupid shit. In 1980, Paul McCartney almost did serious time in Japan for sneaking in some weed.

[The Lawspeaker]

It's somewhat famous that Japan's conviction rate is more than 99%. This is not wrong but a lot of people don't understand the context and as a consequence, completely misunderstand the number. In this video, I explain what the conviction rate actually means and that you have actually a much higher chance of NOT being convicted if you are arrested in Japan.

[Resources]
"Conviction rates in Japan exceed 99 percent. Because Japanese judges can be penalized by a personnel office if they rule in ways the office dislikes, perhaps they face biased incentives to convict. Using data on the careers and opinions of 321 Japanese judges, we find that judges who acquit do have worse careers following the acquittal. On closer examination, though, we find that the punished judges are not those who acquit on the ground that the prosecutors charged the wrong person. Rather, they acquit for reasons of statutory or constitutional interpretation, often in politically charged cases. Thus, the apparent punishment seems unrelated to any pro‐conviction bias at the judicial administrative offices. We suggest an alternative explanation: the high conviction rates reflect case selection and low prosecutorial budgets; understaffed prosecutors present judges with only the most obviously guilty defendants." https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/...
裁判員制度施行から10年 変化した点と今後の改善点を専門家が解説 https://news.radiko.jp/article/statio...
"A finding of “not guilty” was the result in just more than 3% of the more than 390,000 criminal cases in the country in 2008-2009, according to data recently released by Statistics Canada. If Quebec is excluded from the totals the percentage drops to a little more than 1% — just 3,570 people acquitted in the rest of the country last year." https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/...

"これらの事実を踏まえたうえで、
刑法犯の有罪率を考察してみると、
微罪処分の割合29.7％ 不起訴処分の割合61.8％ 確定裁判の無罪率0.03％ これらを統合し、
有罪率は約26.8％ ということになります。" https://刑事事件の弁護士.jp/know/rp/hal-13
The Japanese Judicial System https://www.nichibenren.or.jp/en/abou... 「
平成25年版 犯罪白書」によると，全検挙人員に対する微罪処分の比率は「30.8%」と，約3分の1の事件 が微罪処分と なっています。 https://www.t-nakamura-law.com/column...
刑事事件の不起訴率は高い？早めの弁護士相談で前科を防ぐ https://izumi-keiji.jp/column/jiken-b...
法務省がまとめている平成28年版犯罪白書によると、平成27年の刑法犯における起訴率は39 .1％、起訴 猶予率は50.4％で、道路交通法違反を除く特別法犯においても、起訴率は53.3％、起訴猶 予率は41. 5％となっています。 https://www.keijihiroba.com/endtohow/...