The Japanese Prosecutorial Justice and Its Limited Exclusionary Rule

Abstract

The basic structure of the Japanese criminal justice system is modeled after the Continental criminal justice system emphasizing substantial justice and truth-finding. It often draws admiring attention from the West because of its lower crime rate and higher clearance rate. It is also viewed as “benevolent” due to the lenient disposition of trivial crimes (bizai shobun) by police, routine suspension of prosecution, suspended sentences and short sentences at trial Japanese police have been praised for the rarity of corruption and brutality and for the support and cooperation received from the public. This phenomenon is often explained as a result of the unique traditional Japanese legal culture which emphasizes respect to authority and reintegration into the community. Despite the praise from the West, however, this “heaven for a cop has recently been criticized from within the Japanese legal professional community because of its harsh institutional and cultural treatment of criminal suspects and defendants. A leading Japanese criminal law scholar has criticized Japanese criminal trials as “regrettable” because of the dominant role of investigators in the criminal process. A number of torture and physical violence cases have been revealed. Public trust in the Japanese criminal justice system has also been shaken by the disclosure of a number of highly-publicized retrial cases in which individuals, mistakenly convicted of murders and wrongly sentenced to death, were acquitted after decades on death row. As a result, fundamental reform of the system has been strongly recommended.