Reply #36: Japan? The country where 95% of people arrested end up confessing (whether they did it or not)? [View All]

[Euromutt]

That's a fucking great example.

If you're arrested in Japan, you can be held for 72 hours before you even get access to a lawyer. If a judge signs off on it (which they invariably do), you can be held for 20 days beyond that before they even have to charge you. During those 23 days, you can be questioned without your lawyer present, and without the "interview" being recorded. As a result, it's not surprising that 95% of arrestees end up signing a confession, and a suspiciously large number of people die in police custody.

But I supposed it's just "selfish and self centered" of me, and I'm failing to think of the greater good, to opine that there might be something wrong about the police torturing (yes, torturing) confessions out of detainees because they and the public prosecutors are too fucking incompetent to gather the evidence needed to get a conviction (which means, incidentally, that hard cases like yakuza members can readily escape conviction by resisting the beatings and refusing to confess). And I'm not thinking of the greater good when I find it abhorrent that the judiciary not only tolerates but condones this behavior. And I suppose I'm not thinking of the greater good when I find it utterly disgusting that Yukio Hatoyama, the current prime minister of Japan, said while he was minister of justice that presumption of innocence is "an idea I want to constrain." Or that the justice ministry conducts executions in such secrecy that most Japanese don't even know when and where executions are carried out, or that hanging is the method used.

Yeah, I guess it's just "selfish and self centered" of us Americans that we're not prepared to live in a police state for the benefit of "the greater good."