Ghosn’s daring escape cost his extraction crew their freedom
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
What did they expect to happen?
With the situations reversed: if a Japanese citizen helped break an American out of house arrest before fleeing back to Japan, I would be shocked if America didn't pursue extradition.
Not really what most people would expect when you say 100%
> According to them, Japanese prosecutors will prosecute only the very few cases in which they are most likely to be guilty and not many others.[2][3][4] According to Ryo Ogiso, a professor at Chuo University, prosecutors suspend prosecution for 60% of cases they receive, and end prosecution for the remaining 30% through a simplified judicial process. Only about 8% of cases are actually prosecuted, and this low prosecution rate is the reason for Japan's high conviction rate.[3][5]
The conviction rate is 99.3%. By only stating this high conviction rate it is often misunderstood as too high—however, this high conviction rate drops significantly when accounting for the fact that Japanese prosecutors drop roughly half the cases they are given. If measured in the same way, the United States' conviction rate would be 99.8%.
Just a quick google search shows prosecutors in the US also selectively choose which cases to prosecute (it appears there are around 4x as many cases get dismissed than go all the way to a jury trial), but nonetheless there are many meritless cases that do somehow make it to trial anyways.
I could accept that Japanese prosecutors are a bit better at filtering, but a 99.3% conviction rate does not seem right.
There's many things seriously wrong with the Japanese judicial system, but this isn't one of them.
Mr Ghosn got some concessions only because he had some influence.
In the US it’s a bit different, prosecutors throw as many counts as they can in hopes the accused will plea-deal for a lesser charge.
Not sure what’s worse.
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/06/11/only-2-of-f...
== Edit 91.8% if you include the cases that are dropped.
Thanks to how abusive the plea bargain process is, prosecutors routinely pursue questionable cases, and defendants regularly cave.
See https://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/10/magazine/how-a-2-roadside... for verification of that many innocent people are railroaded into guilty pleas on very little evidence.
Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure, Rule 29(c):
(2) Ruling on the Motion. If the jury has returned a guilty verdict, the court may set aside the verdict and enter an acquittal. If the jury has failed to return a verdict, the court may enter a judgment of acquittal.
Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, Rule 50:
(1) In General. If a party has been fully heard on an issue during a jury trial and the court finds that a reasonable jury would not have a legally sufficient evidentiary basis to find for the party on that issue, the court may ... (B) grant a motion for judgment as a matter of law against the party on a claim or defense that, under the controlling law, can be maintained or defeated only with a favorable finding on that issue.
But if the prosecution’s case was that weak, the judge probably would have granted the defendant’s Rule 29 motion at the close of the prosecution’s case.
It gets lost amidst a mountain of doctrine and procedure, but even in Common Law systems one of the principal functions of a trial, and the judicial office generally, is establishing the truth, just as in continental European systems. Trial procedure is primarily adversarial, but judges absolutely have the power to independently seek the truth. One of the most common ways this manifests in a jury trial is the judge directly posing questions to witnesses. (Judges don't habitually ask questions as merely posing questions could potentially prejudice a defendant--who may be, for example, strategically avoiding some subject matter--and especially in a jury trial judges must be careful to maintain the appearance of impartiality so as not to influence or lose the faith of juries.)
Because in Common Law systems investigative and prosecutorial powers are typically held and executed by another branch of government (or at least another party, public or private), judicial discretion naturally tends to be confined to courtrooms. But historically, and today even in many rural areas with limited government services, judges' roles can be more expansive, fundamentally deriving from their function of establishing the truth.
EDIT: A legal note on Federal Rules of Evidence 614 (Calling and Interrogation of Witnesses by Court) I put together many years ago for my Evidence class: https://25thandClement.com/~william/Evidence/614.pdf For the broader principle at play, see footnote 2 citing the most eminent American scholar of Evidence, John Wigmore, as saying that courts have a duty to "to elicit the truth more fully"; and the statesman Edmund Burke arguing even more broadly that, "A Judge is not placed in that high situation merely as a passive instrument of parties: He has a duty of his own, independent of them, and that duty is to investigate the truth."
Presumably they’ll be compensated for their time in prison.
And as non-violent offenders they’ll likely be in some minimum security prison for the years they spend incarcerated.
Not a trade I’d personally make, but presumably they knew the risks.
I want to learn more about this part.
You have to pretty severely fuck up in federal government/DoD contracting to get prosecuted and need to take a plea deal over some services you rendered (or didn't render properly) in an overseas military mission.
edit: https://www.justice.gov/usao-ut/pr/defendant-procurement-fra...
ctrl-f for "michael taylor"
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/3-former-soldiers-plead-guilt...
I am struggling to understand which part of that brief description of events is supposed to elicit my sympathy for the victims of the alleged betrayal? The way I see it - “they served public interest” is what I would have said.
Personally I’d like criminals, especially if they happen to be wealthy, to face justice just the same. And those who commit crime in an effort to help them avoid that fate in exchange for a share of that wealth - to face justice doubly so.
Strange how Mr. Taylor doesn’t see it the same way. I’d be interested to hear him present a moral argument from his perspective to understand how he interprets this situation.
What happened from there, was there actual corruption or did he piss off the wrong people in Japanese business?
Japanese megacorps are so intertwined with the government it strains belief to think that everyone was clean except Ghosn
Turnabout is fair play.
"In 2014, Emmanuel Macron, then France’s economy minister, pulled a devious stunt under the country’s protectionist Florange Law which doubled the voting rights attached to the French state’s 15 per cent stake in Renault. If this had stood, it would have given the French government ultimate control over Nissan, making it hostage to French political exigencies such as unemployment or the agitations of the gilets jaunes. In the end, Macron’s power grab was limited by the Nissan board, with Ghosn’s support, but the manoeuvre shook the Japanese, and played into suspicions of yet more perfidious designs on the part of the French."
Source: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v44/n02/james-lasdun/fishing...
Maybe "don't ally with foreign corporations" is a more accurate truism.
The Florange Law doubles the voting rights of everyone holding shares for more than 2 years. That includes the Nissan shares in Renault so the balance between Nissan and the French state remained exactly the same. Plus Renault only holds 45% of Nissan. They don’t have a majority.
- Carlos Ghosn was a senior executive at Renault who was sent to Japan to save the struggling Nissan in 1999.
- In his rescue plan, Ghosn proposed cutting jobs, closing factories, and changing the way contracts were awarded.
- Ghosn's foreign background, diplomatic skills, and focus on results helped him implement these changes at Nissan.
- As chairman of Renault-Nissan-Mitsubishi, Ghosn became one of the most successful and powerful executives in the global automotive industry.
- In 2018, Ghosn was arrested in Japan on charges of financial misconduct and spent over a year in jail before escaping to Lebanon in 2019.
- In 2018, Carlos Ghosn, the former chairman of Renault-Nissan-Mitsubishi, was arrested in Japan on charges of financial misconduct.
- Ghosn's arrest was carried out with the help of Nissan executives who opposed Ghosn's plans for a new holding company.
- The Japanese legal system, which allows suspects to be detained without charge for long periods of time, was heavily criticized in the case.
- Ghosn spent over a year in jail before escaping to Lebanon in 2019.
- Many people believed that the charges against Ghosn were politically motivated.
I remember there were a lot of stories about the heist back when it happened, but it is only now I'm actually questioning why we know so much about the heist.
It seems that some of the enforcement mechanisms of surviving/new laws revolve around notifying the families of the victims when a convict receives a large sum of money, from any source. The goal is to give the family a chance to sue in civil court.
Not sure where you got this from? AFAIK that's a purely state level thing, and the first law that tried that in a broad way was unanimously struck down by SCOTUS as an unconstitutional violation of the 1A. And for good reason, when you step back and remember that "crime" itself can be very broad. It wasn't that long ago that homosexual acts could still be a felony in the US. There is a strong public interest in certain criminals sharing details of what they did with journalists after the fact too. New much more limited laws have passed that I think is still up, but the ones I can think of at least are specifically about compensating victims. IIRC the mechanism is to notify and then let them sue in civil court for a longer window. I don't think any of that would apply to purely government criminal action though for somebody who has already served their sentence and paid any fines.
You might be confusing those laws with conditions attached to federal plea bargains in certain kinds of serious cases (national security stuff like terrorism). Since those are individualized "voluntary agreements" [0] specific to a given case they can include things the government couldn't do as blanket laws or even necessarily win as penalties in court at all, and I know there have been agreements that included turning over any and all profits from publishing deals to the US government. But those AFAIK are the exception, not the rule. And they wouldn't have any applicability here either.
Also, there doesn't need to be any special law for victims who have successfully sued in civil court and won a damages award to then go after whatever assets the criminal has or gets down the road to cover it. This might as a practical matter "eliminate profits": if a family of a murder victim won $10m, defendant could only pay $1m, and then the defendant gets a $7m movie deal later, court may award all of the defendant's interest to the family to help satisfy the original judgement. But again, I don't think the Japanese government has any such cause here.
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0: scare quotes around voluntary agreements since there is a lot of reasonable debate about overuse/abuse of plea bargains by US prosecutors. But at least legally they're pretty wide open for now.
It sounds like it's the other way. The Taylors want Ghost to pay them $3mm, and are signaling they're willing to air out some of Ghosn's laundry in the press if he doesn't pony up.
I feel like what Ghosn is quoted saying sounds more like "I don't want to admit that I don't want to pay" rather than "I am planning to pay additional compensation"
But regardless, the story goes on and hasn't become less interesting.
Next chapter might even be called "revenge" where we see a father/son team abduct a wealthy business man from Lebanon to bring him to Japan if he doesn't pay up.
Also note the uncertainty in my opening line, "if you're trying to frame this as civil disobedience." I don't believe that this guy's alleged corruption would fit the bill.