Editorial
Citizen judge system a chance to raise awareness about monitoring gov't work
The lay judge system begins on Thursday and citizens selected randomly across the country will start joining professional judges in trials for serious offenses in late July. However, the system has already effectively been launched as trials of those who have been arrested since the end of last month are subject to the new system.
Fifty-two percent of those surveyed recently by the Mainichi Shimbun expressed their reluctance to participate in criminal trials as lay judges. Less than half of the respondents said they are willing to proactively participate or will only do so because it is their obligation. However, it has to be expected that citizens would be hesitant to participate in trials because of the nature of the system.
Some 45 percent of the pollees said they think the lay judge system will improve criminal trials, well above the percentage of those who believe it will lower the standard of such trials, suggesting that more people positively evaluate the system. Participation in a judiciary should be recognized as not only a public obligation but also a right, and it should be ensured that the system will get off the ground.
It is regrettable that the system is regarded by some as being aimed primarily at reflecting crime victims' feelings during the trials of their accused perpetrators. However, it is the role of lay judges to attach importance to the rights of both crime victims and defendants.
The system is actually designed to prevent false convictions, as professional judges are believed by some to be inclined to side with claims by prosecutors and attach excessive importance to confessions made by defendants. Lay judges are expected to use their common sense as citizens to detect contradictions and inconsistencies in evidence.
There are numerous challenges that must be overcome. It has yet to be addressed whether the same lay judges should also be in charge of trials for additional charges pressed against the same defendants they are trying and to what extent appeal court judges should take into consideration judgments made by lay judges in lower courts. Nor has it been sufficiently examined whether defense lawyers are adequately responding to the newly introduced procedure for narrowing down the points at issue before trials open, which is aimed at speeding up trials, and whether the procedure has any defects that allow judges to overlook evidence or inconsistencies. In December last year, the Hiroshima High Court scrapped a ruling that the Hiroshima District Court promptly handed down on a defendant accused of murdering a young girl on the assumption that lay judges participated in the trial, citing insufficient deliberations, and ordered the lower court to retry the case. Lessons should be learned from this decision.
Prosecutors are required to prove the charges they press against defendants in a way that can be easily understood by lay judges. However, problems have been pointed out involving how to handle photos depicting cruel crime scenes. The recording of investigators' questioning of suspects that helps evaluate the credibility of their confessions has not yet been established as a system supported by a majority of the public. Since the introduction of the lay judge system represents judicial system reform that occurs only about once every 100 years, it is essential to evaluate and review the system through its implementation. At the same time, the public should understand that the introduction of the system represents a change in the way trials are conducted from what has been called a "precise judiciary" because of the precise way that charges are proved and trials are conducted.
What is essential is that citizens should no longer keep silent before the power of the government. Instead, they should proactively judge whether what the government does is appropriate and justifiable and drastically reform a society in which citizens now tend to leave all decision-making to government officials. It should be kept in mind that the lay judge system is aimed at not only ensuring that the judiciary is open to the public but also encouraging citizens to change the public's awareness of government issues.
(Mainichi Japan) May 20, 2009