Top court eyes letting lay judges decide whether to accept confessions

The Supreme Court's Legal Training and Research Institute is set to propose letting lay judges determine whether to accept confessions as evidence when Japan introduces a lay judge system for criminal trials by May 2009, according to an outline of its study report. The outline gives high credit to the recent adoption of videotaped interrogations as an "effective method" of ensuring the credibility of confessions, making it likely to encourage its full introduction.


In Japan, "voluntary confessions" that are accepted by courts in convicting suspects but later turn out to have been forced by investigators have become a major problem due to such recent cases as that of a man found to be innocent after serving two-year prison terms for rape and attempted rape in Toyama Prefecture. In the outline, the institute calls for not using confessions as evidence unless lay judges decide to adopt them in cases where the voluntariness of the confessions is a disputed point.