1.5 Is Speed More Important than the Truth?

If an ordinary person was asked ‘What does “criminal trial” mean?’, he would probably answer, ‘It is an investigation process when the suspect is tried on the grounds of the evidence that proves his guilt’. But, in fact, it is not so easy to find the evidence of what the person has done and what he was thinking of at the time.

But if you believe that ‘only gods know the hidden truth about what humans have done’ and do not try to understand the true state of affairs, there is a high probability that groundless or false facts may be regarded as evidence.

And if it finally results in the death penalty, then neither the lawyer nor the defendant will be able to change anything.

Some such cases have occurred in the history of Japanese justice, especially Menda’s case of July 15, 1983, Seitagawa’s case of March 12, 1984, Matsuyama’s case of July 11, 1984, Shimada’s case of January 31, 1989. I would like to emphasize that death sentences were passed in all those cases due to the miscarriage of justice. However, after those cases had been reconsidered four times, it became clear that the accused were not guilty.

By the way, in England the death penalty was abolished in 1965 after Timothy Johns Evans was executed due to the miscarriage of justice in 1950. It was abolished only because of that case.
In order to avoid such a fatal mistake as the conviction of the innocent, criminal justice has a special system, which enables it to carry out investigations, to establish facts and to pass verdicts in the most objective way. Of course, this alone is not a guarantee of a fair trial. But if you do not stick strictly even to this system, the results may be terrible.

This system aims at helping the judges to decide if the accused is guilty. They consider the picture of the crime suggested by the prosecutor and come to a decision whether the evidence presented by the prosecutor is a proof of the defendant’s guilt. There must be some reasonable arguments to support their verdict.

It means that all the prosecution insists on, i.e. corpus delicity and the facts based on evidence, remain only a hypothesis, a supposition until they are confirmed by the judges.
As far as proofs based on evidence are concerned, the judges must examine all pieces of evidence and dig up the truth together with the defendant and his lawyers. But because the process of establishing facts is changeable and inconstant, naturally, new moot points are sure to arise.

As a means of improving the system of justice the law was adopted, according to which the time of hearings of criminal cases in court is now limited to two years. I would put it as the law about speedy trials. So, nowadays all hearings, including rather difficult cases (up to 99% of all cases), must be completed in two years’ time.

However, there are cases which need more than two years of hearings. And there are serious reasons for that. If these reasons are ignored, lawful trials will not be possible. Every working lawyer who knows the real state of affairs will agree to that.

The problem lies in the fact that if hearings in court continue for a long time, it is a direct indication that the accused is innocent. When the prosecution’s proofs are shattered, it must be understood as a warning to discontinue hearings and immediately to bring in a verdict of ‘not guilty’.

But if in an effort to speed up proceedings such things are not taken into account, it means that some distorted logic is behind the present reform of the Procedural Criminal Code.

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