Japan’s Criminal Justice System Moves at Snail’s Pace

Joji Obara may be Japan’s most notorious symbol of moral decay. The scion of a wealthy family, he entered the country’s property speculation boom just as it turned to bust, yet never allowed failure to crimp a lifestyle that included trolling Tokyo’s nightclubs to hire women for companionship.

Tokyo police and prosecutors allege that he also is a serial rapist and killer. On Feb. 1, in what is the latest in a long line of snail-paced trials in Japan, Obara will be back in court to defend himself over the July 2000 disappearance, rape, death and dismemberment of Lucie Blackman. The 21-year-old British woman was a nightclub hostess last seen at Obara’s beachfront home on the day she died.

Obara has denied killing Blackman. But people have been waiting a long time to hear him explain in court why her severed head was found entombed in concrete within yards of his property south of Tokyo.

Obara, 52, was charged in April 2001 with raping and fatally assaulting Blackman. His trial did not begin until November 2003.

Because Obara was charged with nine rapes and another homicide, it has taken until now for prosecutors to even get to the allegations in court over Blackman’s death, the crux of the case against him.

Prosecutors say the trial will continue for at least several months, the latest example of criminal trials in Japan that can take years to reach a verdict.

Faced with public anger over the slow pace of justice in several high-profile cases, the government has introduced several reforms over the last two years in an attempt to speed up trials. The changes include reintroducing trial by jury -- which Japan abandoned in 1943 -- in the belief that it will restore public trust in a system widely seen as the closed, self-absorbed world of judges and lawyers.

But observers say the key to speeding trials will be found in other reforms, such as increasing the numbers of lawyers and judges and a more open approach to gathering evidence, which would allow suspects to have a lawyer present during interrogations.

There are about 20,000 lawyers and 2,360 judges in a country of 126 million people, with most of them working in civil, not criminal, law. The stretched workload for lawyers and judges means that trials in Japan do not run from start to finish. Instead, the court sits in short sessions of one to three hours, convening only every month or so.

Legal critics say it is not surprising that Japan has so few criminal defense lawyers. In a country where prosecutors rely heavily on confessions and the conviction rate is 99%, most defense lawyers see a system stacked against them.

“They feel they are talking to a wall, not a judge,” said Satoru Shinomiya, a criminal defense lawyer and the bar association’s former director of research for judicial reform. Critics say most confessions are made because investigators are allowed to interrogate suspects for 23 days without a lawyer required to be present, and because suspects are legally obliged to answer questions.

“One of the biggest reasons for confessions is because attorneys are not there at the detention phase of the investigation,” Shinomiya said.

Arguments over the validity of confessions are responsible for some of the longest court cases.

Shinomiya represents Tetsuya Sasaki, who confessed to the 1974 killing of his parents. Sasaki was convicted in 1984 after a 10-year trial, which was followed by several years of appeals. Shinomiya is appealing Sasaki’s conviction on the basis of new evidence that suggests the confession was obtained illegally.

It is not unusual to see defendants contesting the prosecution’s version of what was said during questioning. The accused often claim that their confessions were extracted through intense pressure.

It took prosecutors 13 years and 322 court appearances to convict construction company chairman Hiromasa Ezoe in 2003 of bribing senior politicians and bureaucrats in the 1980s. Ezoe had challenged the accuracy of the depositions taken during his interrogations.

Another long trial had to be abandoned last year when Fujio Takeuchi, the 86-year-old former governor of rural Ibaraki prefecture, was deemed no longer fit to face prosecution after 10 years of court sessions. Takeuchi claimed prosecutors had intimidated him into admitting that he had accepted bribes from construction companies.

Reformers such as Shinomiya say the presence of defense lawyers during questioning should end most disputes over false confessions and the long procedural arguments about the validity of the prosecution’s evidence.

But prosecutors successfully fought off the bar association’s attempts to allow the recording of those sessions, arguing that videotaping interrogations might deter suspects from confessing.

The failure to take that step leaves some observers convinced that little will change.

“I don’t think the [new] defense lawyer rule will affect confession rates much,” said David Johnson, a professor at the University of Hawaii who has studied Japan’s criminal justice system.

“Detectives and prosecutors have many more legal levers than their American counterparts have, such as the suspect’s duty to endure questioning. They should be able to continue present practices, more or less.”

There is clearly a widespread public desire for speedier justice, particularly in the wake of the infamously long trial of Shoko Asahara, who founded the Aum Supreme Truth, an apocalyptic cult.

Asahara, whose real name is Chizuo Matsumoto, was found guilty and sentenced to death last year for a series of crimes that included inspiring his followers to unleash lethal doses of sarin gas on the Tokyo subway system in 1995, killing 12 people and sickening thousands.

The trial lasted seven years and 10 months before Asahara was given a death sentence, which he is appealing in a process that lawyers say could take several more years. The delays have angered a public that was traumatized by the attacks.

But defense lawyers argue that it is defendants whose rights are compromised by long trials in a system heavily weighted in the prosecution’s favor.”It’s not fair to say the Aum case took such a long time,” said Osamu Watanabe, who headed Asahara’s defense team. Watanabe said that the police investigation was “sloppy” and that the heinous nature of the crime made it extremely difficult for Asahara to get a fair trial.

“This trial involved 17 charges against him, including two mass murder cases, so it is natural to take this amount of time,” Watanabe argued. “I would say this case went rather quickly.”