Problems Concerning Examination of Medical Evidence in the Japanese Lay Judge System

• In Event: Poster Session

Abstract

Ministry of Justice, Japan started the lay judge system in May 2009, and there, members of the public participate in criminal trials as citizen judges. The new system is applied to trials for such serious crimes as murder and burglary. Now, more than five years have passed since its inception.
A woman in her 60s suffered from acute stress disorder upon serving as a lay judge in a case at the Fukushima District Court's Koriyama branch in which the accused was eventually sentenced to death. She sued the government for damages in accordance with State Redress Act. Currently, the photographs of the victim’s bodies are shown only in black-and-white photos or illustrations and that lay judges are given prior warnings about the images.
In Japan, unlike the United States having the tradition of the jury system, intervention in judicial proceedings tends to be regarded not as right but as duty. Therefore, the Japanese government does not consider access to exact evidences to be the right of the citizen judge.
In this session, we will report the problems of the citizen judge trial, when handling the medical evidence including the photos of the victim’s body.

Author

• Saori Nambu, Yokohama City University