This is 20 years old, but there is something weird about Japanese crime statistics. They might not be as good as much of a low crime society as commonly stated: http://sci-hub.la/10.2307/29766810 (Is Japan Exceptional? Reconsidering Japanese Crime Rates)
This is purely anecdotal but my sister lived in Japan for many years, and she tells me that the policing there is very... uneven, I guess you'd describe it. The police won't get too involved in anything that's not a sure bet to be solved (eg. unexpected deaths are very likely to be written off as suicide) but on the flip side, once they accuse you of something the conviction rate is near 100%. Also if you get a speeding ticket you have to write an apology letter saying how sorry you are, as well as pay the fine.
For those interested in this, there is a very good Japanese movie whose English title is "I just didn't do it". "Based on a true story, the film focuses on the story of a young man charged with groping on a train. Following the events depicted in the film, he was confirmed innocent and saved from his effective imprisonment after a five-year legal battle." [1]
You'll find in this movie exactly what the parent describes, the apology culture as well as how difficult the system makes it for you once you've been accused of an offense.
Talking about movies, albeit a different kind, swedish movie kopps is a comedy about a city so devoid of crime, the agents starts to make up things to keep their job.
Even though this is really off-topic, Kopps is a great movie, as is Jalla Jalla by the same director the latter being even more off-topic as it has nothing to do with crime nor Japan but is instead a romantic comedy set in Sweden.
A well-functioning criminal justice system should always have a high conviction rate, because part of the police and state prosecution service's job is to ensure that they only bring charges and fight cases they think they can win. Given they're experts in criminal prosecution, you would expect them to get it right 90-95% of the time.
But there's still a lot of variation in how you get to that situation. E.g. how willing are the police to investigate cases that have a low chance of conviction? How willing are they to coerce confessions or fabricate evidence? Is sentencing and plea-bargaining designed to encourage early guilty pleas regardless of innocence? At trial, how willing are judges to lead juries towards a guilty verdict? These kind of issues are at play in every country's criminal justice system, but, for a modern democracy, Japan seems to have a particularly pervasive culture of police intimidation and coercion.
Quick example, you own a gun in your Florida home. Unbeknownst to you, your (idiot) cousin smokes a joint in the driveway before leaving and leaves joint on your table. Neighbors call police, they enter your home (based on smell) and find a gun and a joint. You are looking at 10 YEARS in federal jail [i] as a prohibited gun owner, a few months in county (for the joint), possibly some time in state prison for child endangerment (kids were home), and the CPS took your kids that day. IT DOES NOT MATTER if your are innocent or guilty you will do a plea deal. No jury for you. US prosecutors rely on extremely harsh possible sentences to bully innocent defendants into jail.
This is a great comment. You did miss one requirement to fall into federal jurisdiction:
C. The firearm or ammunition was transported across a state line at any
For you to be caught with clause C the prosecutor just needs to prove the gun wasn't manufactured in your state. Example you own a glock pistol (popular), what you would find is fine print like: "Glocks for sale in the U.S. are made in Austria and assembled in Smyrna GA." Reading that as a defendant would be depressing since it extremely easy to prove - just getting a fax from the company would end it. Then if you look at ammunition, "9mm - 115 Grain FMJ - Tula - 500 Rounds" (as a popular example) you would see fine print such as: "TulAmmo is sourced from eastern countries like Russia and uses wartime-proven methods of manufacturing and material selection in order to make ammunition as affordable and practical as possible".
An attorney's website (i suppose he has experience):
"If the firearm in question was manufactured in a state other than the state in which possession or receipt occurred, a jury may, but are not required to, find that it was transported across a state line." [i]
In all honesty, I think federal prosecutors wont really care about (C) since proving it takes about 10 minutes with a fax machine and they have NEVER seen a case where the gun (and components) and bullets were manufactured in the same state. If they were manufactured in your state I would consider yourself one lucky [expletive].
I don’t get how you see plea bargaining as the evil thing in that scenario. To me, the shock of that scenario comes from the extremely harsh penalties, often for crimes that can stem from negligence.
If you believed the possible punishment were indeed proportional to the crime, would you still be outraged at plea bargaining? And would the same logic apply to any variance reduction strategy (like insurance) or just this one?
"I don’t get how you see plea bargaining as the evil thing in that scenario."
Because you don't get one of the fundamental constitutional rights our country was founded on: The right to a jury. Prosecutors should be forced to face a jury.
And you don’t get that that’s a right, not an obligation. A right can be waived (in return for a consideration), an obligation can’t.
In a plea bargain, the state is recognizing your right to a trial; that’s why they can’t just give you the punishment directly! They are offering a reduced sentence in exchange for you waiving that right. At no point is the right not recognized, unless you think that’s what happens with guilty pleas too.
(Edited to provide explanation rather than funny but confusing skit.)
The problem is the prosecutors have an incentive to rack up as many patently ridiculous charges as possible in an effort to strengthen their position in the plea bargain. Something relatively minor balloons into the possibility you could spend the rest of your life in jail... or you could take the plea and be out in a few years.
That effectively removes your right to a jury trial, particularly when the natural human tendency of a juror is to split the baby, i.e. if you get charged with 60 counts they're unlikely to find you "not guilty" on all 60 regardless of circumstances.
I agree with OP - if the crime isn't important enough to take to trial, it's not important enough to prosecute. Furthermore I would add judges should sanction prosecutors for overcharging. If I have $100k in cash I put into the bank in $5k increments that's one charge of Structuring with a potential five year sentence - I shouldn't be looking at twenty charges with a century in jail if I refuse the plea.
That still seems like more of a problem with overcharging and absurd penalties, rather than plea bargaining. Did you see the question about whether you would feel the same way if the charge and possible punishment were reasonable? Edit: and the comparison to guilty pleas?
If the outcome of the plea bargain is about what the defendant would expect after conviction on reasonable charges, plea bargaining would be fine. But that's fantasyland.
The problem is the incentives are set up such that the charges will not be reasonable. They can't be reasonable, since the state can't possibly afford to take more than a tiny percentage of cases to trial. Which sets up another incentive - the state must make an example out of people who demand a trial to encourage everyone else to take the plea.
I don't know where else to post this question, but why can I not reply to some comments in this thread? For example I can reply to this comment, but I cannot reply to gozur88's comment beneath yours.
To gozur88 if you see this, I am pretty worried about this too, and it seems like a huge violation of our rights that charges can be placed on individuals simply for leverage in a negotiation between the state and the individual. It is actually pretty absurd that we allow any kind of negotiation whatsoever in criminal courts because the usual principles of consent that are usually prerequisites to legally binding negotiations are absent. An individual is threatened with violence and then from that position are not on equal footing with the prosecution.
>I don't know where else to post this question, but why can I not reply to some comments in this thread? For example I can reply to this comment, but I cannot reply to gozur88's comment beneath yours.
There's an increasing delay between when a comment is posted and when you can reply, based on the depth. The idea is to create a "cooldown" period for people who are upset. You would have been able to reply to my comment eventually.
If I understand correctly sometimes there's a delay before you can reply to a comment. I don't think it's "always on", but specifically for threads with a lot of discussion.
Narrowly, you're right: the problem is sentence length, not plea bargaining. But broadly, causality doesn't run that way: states overwhelmingly prefer plea bargains on many levels (DAs want high conviction rates, states want few trials, etc.), so harsh maximum sentences are implemented primarily as a threat to help encourage plea bargains.
Even on a too-crude statistical level we can see the problem: if an innocent person has a 20% chance of being convicted, but the offered plea bargain is 1 year and the maximum sentence is 10 years, innocent people will do better by pleading guilty. The "10 years" is a problem, but it's a consequence of wanting to drive plea bargains.
(The fundamental problem in this case is the 20% chance, but frankly no one seems to have any hope for a system that doesn't regularly convict innocents.)
Yes, states -- and the society in general -- should have a slight preference against going to trial. Trials cost resources, and it makes sense for the body politic to compensate defendants who are willing to save society the expense of a trial that they expect to result in a guilty verdict anyway.
This is why most societies allow guilty pleas in the first place!
A plea bargain is nothing but a guilty plea + certainty about the sentence. If you're okay with guilty pleas but not plea bargains, then you think the introduction of certainty in the sentence makes it somehow worse. That's hard to justify.
I reiterate that the focus on the "plea bargain" part of this whole thing seems misplaced. If anything, it's the part that makes sense; the problem is the high penalties and bad-faith charges, which is what should be penalized.
>if an innocent person has a 20% chance of being convicted, but the offered plea bargain is 1 year and the maximum sentence is 10 years, innocent people will do better by pleading guilty. The "10 years" is a problem, but it's a consequence of wanting to drive plea bargains.
>(The fundamental problem in this case is the 20% chance,
That sounds more like tilting against the windmill of "variance in extreme events". We also have the problem that there's a 1% chance of being in a car accident with tens of thousands of dollars in costs. In most cases, we shrug and say "insure it" -- i.e. trade a small probability of extreme loss for a guaranteed smaller one. Why do we see it as suddenly a problem when people do the same thing in the justice system?
Every legit example of it being a catastrophe turns out to draw its entire badness from some other already-bad part of the justice system, not the plea bargaining.
"And you don’t get that that’s a right, not an obligation"
Horrifying. Ok. So slavery is back in the game. Hey, sign this and if you don't meet the requirements you are a slave -- you are "waiving that right". I am sure you are trolling.... right?
I don't think that plea bargaining is inherently a bad thing, but when there's a massive disparity between the plea-bargained sentence and the normal sentence and especially if the police can start treating suspects like felons even before going to trial (taking kids away, confiscating property, etc.) then there's a large possibility for abuse.
I think a good system would be to offer plea-bargains but only at a set percentage reduction of the original sentence, and only if the suspect isn't under some other form of pressure from the police. That would still encourage people who know the police have a very solid case against them to take the bargain, but not do much to encourage people who think they have a real shot at winning a trial by jury.
> If you believed the possible punishment were indeed proportional to the crime, would you still be outraged at plea bargaining? And would the same logic apply to any variance reduction strategy (like insurance) or just this one?
You mean if there was a fine of $1 per domain (per year?) as opposed to possible felony under CFAA to scrape public documents on the Internet? I don't want to get into moral nihilism or whatever we call it but what is a crime? Why are some acts criminal? What makes them different from a civil suit between two parties?
My entire home regardless of value is protected from creditors in Florida (even if you sue me!), whereas you’re on the hook for your spouses medical bills even after their death in California (community property state).
Will take my Florida chances :)
(This is also why so many wealthy individuals make it their state of residence, besides no state income tax)
Jake Adelstein's book Tokyo Vice was an eye opener in this regard. The amount of effort the cops put into a case has a lot to do with the victim. Non-white foreigners and gangsters aren't worth a lot of trouble, e.g. if they find a dead guy with yakuza tattoos at the bottom of a building it's a suicide. Case closed.
One line from the discussion section of this paper seemed to capture the essence of the concern:
>Although Japan's rate
of homicide is low compared to many other advanced countries, Japan's rate of unexpected deaths including homicides, traffic accidents, industrial accidents, and suicides is near the median among the selected advanced industrial countries.
