Extract:
Beginning in 2009, Japan will institute a jury system called saiban-in. Juries consisting of three law-trained judges and six citizens chosen by lottery will decide criminal cases by majority vote. Japan had an American-style jury system for 15 years, but it was abolished by Japan's military government in 1943. Since then, verdicts have been decided by three-judge panels, leaving citizens with no voice in a system in which virtually all criminal trials end in a conviction. ...&&&
According to surveys conducted by a sociologist, Hiroshi Fukurai, the prospect of jury service intimidates many Japanese; other polls show 70 percent of them don't want to be on juries. ...
4 comments:
See the recent Cornell conference on "Citizen Participation in East Asian Legal Systems," http://www.lawschool.cornell.edu/international/clarke_program/conferences/Citizen-Participation-2.cfm
I have chopped up the URL for the conference here:
http://www.lawschool.cornell.edu/
international/clarke_program/
conferences/
Citizen-Participation-2.cfm
but you will have to put the three parts back together to access the web page
"the three law-trained judges and six citizens"
As an outsider, but still having read at least something about small group psychology, I think that mixing judges and citizens may result in non-professionals just aligning to the trained members. Or, juries may start spending too much time in internal just-in-time education in law (judges teaching citizens). On the other hand, the Japanese are one of the few cultures who have made quality circles and related participative decision-making procedures to work.
* In Russia, a jury composed of citizens, unanomously acquitted the officer accused of war crimes (killing then burning civilians). The jury was released then, and the process was repeated.
Dear pp,
The problem of deference by lay judges (or assessors) to professional judges is real. Germany (as I recall) has taken various steps to reduce this sort of deference. For example, in at least some courts lay judges are appointed to a term of years. To some extent, Germany minimizes lay deference by professionalizing lay judges.
When I visited Latvia ca. 1991, I sat in on a proceeding in a court of the first instance and I spoke with the judge. One of the two lay judges (in the old SSR-style court) had failed to appear and the professional judge was leafing through her address book and was trying to find someone who would agree, at the last moment, to serve as a lay judge. The procedure for selecting lay judges was decidedly informal and the professional judge (at least in this situation) was free to choose who she liked. (In Latvia at the time almost all professional judges of the first instance were women. The current president of Latvia is a woman. The Latvians do fairly well on the gender front.)
At the time I was in Latvia with a group of law teachers from various parts of the world. After hearing R. Lempert and some other people talk about lay participation in judicial proceedings, a young deputy in the office of the procurator general proposed various measures to reduce lay judges' deference to professional judges. I particularly liked his suggestion that lay judges and professional judges initially deliberate separately about factual questions. Richard Lempert, however, suggested to the deputy procurator that lay participation would be effective only if the number of lay judges were substantial -- at least six, I think Lempert said.
Peter T
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