Japan: Man Beaten Into False Confession of Child Murder Set Free After 17 Years in Prison
Our Lisa Katayama of BB Gadgets, who also maintains the Tokyomango blog about Japanese culture, says,
Man intimidated into admitting murder is set free after 17 years in prison (Tokyomango)
A guy who served 17+ years for child murder in Japan was proved innocent and freed yesterday. He claims he was threatened and beaten into making a confession, and his dad died from shock after his conviction. Sad.
the latest
latest episodes
yep, just about a hundred percent "confession" and conviction rate after arrest. Do NOT get arrested. And foreigners best take care, they are fed up with idiots and are more inclined to toss you into the Japanese jug than kick you out of the country. Japanese prisons are a special kind of hell.
On the other hand, Japan only has about 30,000 lawyers - as opposed to a million in the US for only two and a bit times more people. Also, people tend to more polite. Compare that with American society which is armed. No guns in Japan.
More proof that torture, besides being morally reprehensible, doesn't work. Yes, sad is the right word...
nope, you can't say torture doesn't work. Torture works very well, it just depends what you are trying to do. If you want to get the truth, forget torture. If you want confessions, go with torture every time. Heck, just the credible threat of torture will get you a confession.
In Japan there is a fascinating dichotomy (easy to be academic about it since I'm not the one having my blood sprayed all over the police station walls - yeh, happened to a good friend of mine), they routinely violate basic human rights in the most atrocious ways and at the same time it can be argued the product is a safe, civil society. Or up to relatively recently anyway, lately the news from Japan is distressing.
I am so glad we don't do this kind of thing in America.
if anyone needs a reason to oppose the death penalty, here it is again.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_punishment_in_Japan
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_punishment_in_the_United_States
I am reminded of the film, I Just Didn't Do It. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0794350/
@Airship: You're being facetious, right?
It is a well known fact amongst the American "intelligence" community that "forced" confessions are totally invalid, because people will say anything to stop being frickin tortured. Duh!
What's moronic, immoral, and totally senseless is that the Cheney & Co. regime used torture for forced confessions - despite the fact that it's ineffective and against international law.
What he meant was "I am so glad we don't do this kind of thing on American soil."
Torture works. Everyone knows that.
mmm, speaking of American soil... does Cheney have to have that in his coffin?
Right, nobody in the US has ever been coerced into confession and then decades later found to be innocent through DNA testing. Just like we've always been at war in east Asia.
Of course the really sad thing about false convictions is that they are always a double tragedy.
On the one hand, an innocent man spent 17 years in a Japanese jail (and yes, they are a special kind of hell), and on the other a child murder got away scott free, and in all liklihood killed again.
It always bugs me when people say "Well, it's better to lock up a few innocent people occasionally than risk letting the guilty go free". Apart from the "occasionally" being something of an understatement, for every innocent person locked up in prison, there is a guilty person walking the streets.
I highly recommend reading this 10-part journal of a gaigin in a Japanese prison(covered by Boing Boing here)
Reminds me of a CSI episode where the lab technician had to process evidence that implicated a co-agent as a murder. BUT she couldn't believe her co-worker was a murdering type so she ran over and over the evidence till she found the red herring and in lieu, the real killer. Point is, how many episodes does she not get very through and re-evaluate the forensic evidence before submitting her findings? There by implicating innocent persons with what might seem sketchy evidence? No pun intended. In real life, its very possible this happens often. Human err and then cover the tracks. Not really police work, more like, filling a production quota.
Two cases actually highlighted the failings of a criminal justice system which depends entirely on having signed confessions, the first was the trial of Shoko Asahara, the head of Aum, the doomsday cult that released sarin gas in the Tokyo subway and the second was Masumi Hayashi aka the Curry Poisoner, arrested after putting arsenic in food being given out at a local festival.
In both cases the police were forced to compile physical evidence proving these people were guilty of the crimes they were arrested for as neither would sign confessions.
In Japan, 99 percent of arrests result in a conviction. That doesn't mean that everyone who is arrested actually committed the crime for which they are accused, of course.
Usually, when you are arrested, it is actually IN YOUR BEST INTEREST to confess immediately whether you have committed the crime or not because you can assume with almost absolute certainty that you will ultimately be convicted and your punishment will be much, much more severe if you didn't confess from the beginning.
In the movie, sore demo, boku ha yattenai (Even so, I didn't do it), a man who was falsely confused of molesting a school girl is sentenced to three months in prison after disputing the charges. Had he simply confessed? A five-hundred dollar fine and no prison time.
http://www.japantoday.com/category/crime/view/ministers-reluctant-to-ok-full-videotaping-of-suspects-questioning
Good to see the media promoting good old fashioned nepotism. I'm guessing this happens a lot in real life. Just run the test until you get a false negative and proceed to round up the usual suspects.
"...they routinely violate basic human rights in the most atrocious ways and at the same time it can be argued the product is a safe, civil society."
I think what you mean, Takuan, is that they move the crime and violence INTO the police station and justice system thus it does not form part of the official statistics. I'm quite sure that if you added up these instances you'd get a different figure. Given the offender is back on the street, having got away with it, they are more experienced and more careful.
Add this to the fact that I'm as suspicious of the reporting of crime statistics in Japan as I am of the reporting in Hong Kong and the rest of China.
As another example, I can't find it, but some years ago it was shown that the suicide rate in the Republic of Ireland was significantly lower than other European countries. There were debates about it being related to the countries Catholicism. It eventually came out that suicides were usually recorded under another category (eg. natural death, death by some disease) *because* of the degree of fear Catholicism generates in relation to suicide and the shame of the families involved.
I'm therefore very suspicious of the information available from Japan - a country which takes the notion of 'saving face' far more seriously than many others.
99% of Japanese NEVER get arrested.
@#10:
http://www.chicagoreader.com/policetorture/
Fail. Next?
Jeffrey Mark Deskovic.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/25/us/25jeffrey.html
Not getting arrested and not going to court are of course the best option but for anyone who has been following legal mumbo-jumbo in Japan you've probably noticed that they have finally switched to a 'jury' system (where a 'jury of your peers' is actually assembled to both decide on a verdict AND the assist in the harshness of the sentence)
I wonder how that's going to change things over here...esp. the infamous 99% conviction rate.
Sorry, I forgot:
/sarcasm
http://rawstory.com/08/news/2009/06/09/london-police-waterboarding-pot/