From an ethical perspective, it matters that the Japanese criminal system has a 100% conviction rate and even the judge thinking the defendant is innocent won't result in an acquittal.
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%.
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.
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.
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."