142 Retrial Experts Blast Japan Govt Council Proposal

(4th para should have read “… evidence be …,” instead of as sent) Tokyo, April 6 (Jiji Press)–Japan’s retrial and wrongful conviction experts released a joint statement Monday opposing a government council’s controversial proposal on retrial system reform. The proposal by the Legislative Council, which advises the justice minister, is saddled with “serious problems,” the group of 142 criminal law researchers and other experts said. In February, the council advised that the scope of evidence investigative authorities will be ordered to disclose in the retrial request proceedings be limited and that the prosecution be continuously allowed to appeal retrial orders. The government plans to introduce a bill to amend the Code of Criminal Procedure accordingly. In the statement, however, the experts demanded that evidence be shown to retrial petitioners and that the scope of disclosure orders be broad. They also opposed proposed penalties for using disclosed evidence for improper purposes, such as making it available to retrial advocates and the news media. Furthermore, they called for prohibiting the prosecution from appealing retrial orders, saying the ban “should help bring a retrial to a final ruling faster.” Prosecutors’ repeated appeals against court decisions to reopen trials in the past have made it impossible to expect that they will file such complaints in an appropriate manner, they noted. “We feel a sense of crisis,” Hiroyuki Kuzuno, professor at Aoyama Gakuin University and an organizer for the joint statement, said at a press conference in Tokyo. “We thought we should clarify our opinion because this law revision will affect the basis of criminal justice.” “Views of researchers in the council are totally different from those of the 142 experts and do not reflect at all either common understanding or majority theory in our academic community,” said Tomonobu Ishida, professor at Meiji University. END [Copyright The Jiji Press, Ltd.]