I spend a lot of time these days reliving the past and among other things I have been singing the praises of Japan, a country I came to call home after twenty-four years of residence there. After some initial awkwardness, I quickly came to appreciate its many obvious virtues, starting with a people who are fundamentally other-oriented, nature-loving, and who share my view that life ought to be lived in avoidance of violence and deceit. Japan has been very good to me; it provided me with an occupation which enabled me to buy a home in the San Francisco Bay Area, and a husband I love dearly. I am at home with its hot springs, its cuisine, its civility and its mostly modest ways.
On the downside, what I find fault with are largely trivial things. I often cite the line, "How can Japan know so much about what it beautiful and so little about what is ugly?" which addresses the garishness and tackiness of its cities. But there is one thing about Japan which startled me the first time I heard of it as incongruent with its order, civility and safe streets, and that is the fact that over 99% of police indictments lead to conviction. Defenders of the system will say that is because the police are careful to build an open-and-shut case before they indict; I'm with those who worry it speaks to the extent the police will go to get lawbreakers to confess to their crimes.
Japan has what is called a "hostage justice" system where suspects are held in prolonged physical detention and denied bail to pressure or coerce them into confessing to crimes. Human Rights Watch attributes the high conviction rate to the fact that Japan prioritizes confessions over due process. There is an upside to this: if one shows proper contrition, the sentencing may be light because, one assumes, there is a consciousness of a national community in which expulsion or some other kind of excommunication is viewed as unduly harsh. But woe betide those who maintain their innocence.
Listen to a couple testimonies of victims of this Japanese "guilty until proven innocent" approach.
Which brings me to the reason I've brought this topic up in the first place. A former colleague of mine mentioned on a Facebook page that she had just made a visit to Chiba Prison to visit Chris Payne, an American fighting a wrongful conviction. The Tokyo High Court reversed his guilty conviction when they found that DNA evidence used to convict him had been falsified. Yet, astonishingly, he has remained in solitary confinement for the last four years and nine months. He was moved from Tokyo to Chiba recently for retrial purposes, but apparently due to the court’s scheduling congestion the retrial date is not set to begin until next April, a full eight months from now. In solitary confinement! The injustice is glaring. The conviction was based on a falsified DNA analysis. And while the analyst goes scot free, Chris sits in solitary. Something here stinks to heaven.
Where are the good guys here? Where is the American Embassy? Chris is from Indiana. Where are his Senators and Congressmen? The U.S. press covered the story initially, but where has it been since?
(I urge you to follow the links here, here and here and get the background to the whole story.)
My colleague managed to meet with Chris and was distressed to hear of his untreated health conditions and disturbed by the fear she heard in his voice.
I have no direct personal knowledge of Chris Payne's case, but I do trust what my colleague has posted on her Facebook page and the reports from the press seem credible. There is so much injustice floating about these days that this may not strike you as worth more than passing interest, but I find the case so egregious that I simply had to take the time to call it to your attention.
Help me make this injustice go away.
