09-07-2002, 05:07 PM
'Delinquent' lawyers fire blanks for fee
By MICHAEL HOFFMAN
DaCapo (Sept. 4)
Lawyers. The more desperately they are needed the more warily they are regarded -- tarred, perversely, by the sorrows that make them necessary. Their intelligence is respected, even held in awe, but their honesty is doubted. Do we want them to be honest? Or do we hire them to manipulate the system on our behalf?
Tokyo Confidential surveys popular vernacular magazines -- often "salacious, libelous and utterly unreliable" -- to discover what the Japanese are "really thinking."
DaCapo quotes a "popular belief" that of Japan's 20,000 lawyers in private practice, 5,000 are "delinquent." Twenty thousand lawyers! That says a lot about the kind of society Japan is. In the U.S. lawyers number close to a million. On the other hand, 20,000 represents a 60 percent increase over the past two decades -- which may say something about the kind of society Japan is becoming.
Keiko, 29, was 21 when she had her first brush with the law. She has had several since, and is something of an expert on the low end of the legal profession. She doesn't think much of it.
Police stopping her for a routine traffic check found stimulant drugs in her car. Taken to the station, she was questioned till 4:30 a.m., permitted a few hours' sleep, then questioned again off and on for two days.
She chose a lawyer at random from a list of names police showed her. It was either that or settle for a public defender -- but the public defender, she was told, had no authority to file a bail application.
"It was really weird," she tells DaCapo. "It was like all they wanted was my money. I had to pay a 100,000 yen 'donation' to the legal association my lawyer belonged to. Then he made me write on the bail form how sorry I was for what I'd done. His bill was 500,000 yen. Later, I found out there was no need to pay the 'donation' at all."
Released after getting a suspended sentence, Keiko was soon in trouble again -- another narcotics infraction. This time she didn't bother hiring her own lawyer. A public defender would do. She figured she had no chance of being granted bail anyway.
At the opposite extreme is jailed lawmaker Muneo Suzuki, whose legal team includes former prosecutors specializing in precisely the sort of political corruption charges they now battle as his defenders. If they don't know the ropes, who does? Maybe the ropes are too tangled for anyone to really know them. "The strongest in history," the team has been called -- and yet, DaCapo observes wryly, their best efforts have failed to quash the indictments.
With no jury system, Japanese courts lack the theatrical element for which, thanks to TV and the movies, Western courts are famous.
Much in Japan depends on confessions, and wringing confessions out of suspects is behind-the-scenes work. If not theater, at least literature of a kind comes into play. Police reports are based on confessions, and a badly written one risks getting thrown out of court. Pains are taken to ensure that the writing is just so.
A good report requires a convincing motive and suitable expressions of remorse. Police stations keep "model reports" on hand, to be followed as closely as possible. Police write them, prosecutors rewrite them. They are essentially hearsay evidence, and therefore suspect in principle. Why then are they given such weight?
"For the sake of convenience," DaCapo hears from lawyer Hiroshi Yamaguchi, author of a book entitled "Rot in the Justice System." Without a certain amount of corner-cutting, Yamaguchi says, more trials would drag out like the Aum Shinrikyo prosecution, whose seeming endlessness has much to do with the defense's persistent challenging of police reports.
A stagnant court system is falling further and further behind society, DaCapo believes. District Court Judge Nobuyoshi Asami does not disagree. Judges whose entire careers are confined to judging end up with a cloistered view of life. That, he says, is a big part of the problem.
By MICHAEL HOFFMAN
DaCapo (Sept. 4)
Lawyers. The more desperately they are needed the more warily they are regarded -- tarred, perversely, by the sorrows that make them necessary. Their intelligence is respected, even held in awe, but their honesty is doubted. Do we want them to be honest? Or do we hire them to manipulate the system on our behalf?
Tokyo Confidential surveys popular vernacular magazines -- often "salacious, libelous and utterly unreliable" -- to discover what the Japanese are "really thinking."
DaCapo quotes a "popular belief" that of Japan's 20,000 lawyers in private practice, 5,000 are "delinquent." Twenty thousand lawyers! That says a lot about the kind of society Japan is. In the U.S. lawyers number close to a million. On the other hand, 20,000 represents a 60 percent increase over the past two decades -- which may say something about the kind of society Japan is becoming.
Keiko, 29, was 21 when she had her first brush with the law. She has had several since, and is something of an expert on the low end of the legal profession. She doesn't think much of it.
Police stopping her for a routine traffic check found stimulant drugs in her car. Taken to the station, she was questioned till 4:30 a.m., permitted a few hours' sleep, then questioned again off and on for two days.
She chose a lawyer at random from a list of names police showed her. It was either that or settle for a public defender -- but the public defender, she was told, had no authority to file a bail application.
"It was really weird," she tells DaCapo. "It was like all they wanted was my money. I had to pay a 100,000 yen 'donation' to the legal association my lawyer belonged to. Then he made me write on the bail form how sorry I was for what I'd done. His bill was 500,000 yen. Later, I found out there was no need to pay the 'donation' at all."
Released after getting a suspended sentence, Keiko was soon in trouble again -- another narcotics infraction. This time she didn't bother hiring her own lawyer. A public defender would do. She figured she had no chance of being granted bail anyway.
At the opposite extreme is jailed lawmaker Muneo Suzuki, whose legal team includes former prosecutors specializing in precisely the sort of political corruption charges they now battle as his defenders. If they don't know the ropes, who does? Maybe the ropes are too tangled for anyone to really know them. "The strongest in history," the team has been called -- and yet, DaCapo observes wryly, their best efforts have failed to quash the indictments.
With no jury system, Japanese courts lack the theatrical element for which, thanks to TV and the movies, Western courts are famous.
Much in Japan depends on confessions, and wringing confessions out of suspects is behind-the-scenes work. If not theater, at least literature of a kind comes into play. Police reports are based on confessions, and a badly written one risks getting thrown out of court. Pains are taken to ensure that the writing is just so.
A good report requires a convincing motive and suitable expressions of remorse. Police stations keep "model reports" on hand, to be followed as closely as possible. Police write them, prosecutors rewrite them. They are essentially hearsay evidence, and therefore suspect in principle. Why then are they given such weight?
"For the sake of convenience," DaCapo hears from lawyer Hiroshi Yamaguchi, author of a book entitled "Rot in the Justice System." Without a certain amount of corner-cutting, Yamaguchi says, more trials would drag out like the Aum Shinrikyo prosecution, whose seeming endlessness has much to do with the defense's persistent challenging of police reports.
A stagnant court system is falling further and further behind society, DaCapo believes. District Court Judge Nobuyoshi Asami does not disagree. Judges whose entire careers are confined to judging end up with a cloistered view of life. That, he says, is a big part of the problem.