Japan Panel to Review Retrial System

   Tokyo, Feb. 7 (Jiji Press)--Japanese Justice Minister Keisuke Suzuki said Friday that he will ask the Legislative Council to review the retrial system for criminal cases in which guilty verdicts became the final judgment.
   A focus of the discussions at the advisory body for the minister is expected to be disclosure standards for evidence held by investigators. The Justice Ministry will make preparations so that the review can be entrusted to the council as early as March.
   The retrial system is stipulated in the Code of Criminal Procedure. But the code has only 19 articles related to the system, and rules are unclear in many aspects. How to run the system is largely left to the discretion of courts.
   This situation is widely seen as a problem. Retrials tend to take a long time, while the quality of proceedings differs from one court to another, posing a problem called retrial gaps.
   Over the 1966 murder of four members of a family in the central Japan prefecture of Shizuoka, Iwao Hakamata took 44 years to prove his innocence until his acquittal was finalized last October, after his death sentence became the final judgment.

(2025/02/07-15:13)

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