Why is the conviction rate in North America and Japan so high? What causes the conviction rates in North America and Japan to be so high? Are the cases usually strong where this happens? And what happens to weaker cases, do they result in an acquittal or do they generally not get cleared at all? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conviction_rate
Japan's justice system is sometimes called hostage justice In general, the Japanese justice system has a more than 99% conviction rate! In part, this is because the number of state attorneys is super low - on about half the population of the US, there were only 2000 State attorneys out of 35000 lawyers in Japan, whereas the USA has a five-to-six digit number of state/district/... attorneys and 1.5 million lawyers in total. Or in other words: each state-employed attorney is responsible for more than 10 times the people and the caseload they create, and lawyers are prohibitively expensive. This leads to a two-pronged result: on the one hand, only the best cases should be followed up on and brought to court. Depending on the statistics, about every other case (~50%) that the police investigators hand to the prosecution is not followed up on by the prosecution. The other result is, that the Japanese justice system relies heavily on confessions obtained from the defendants. As I elaborated when comparing the detention time without charges, the Japanese justice system is unlike almost any other modern justice system in the world in some regards, even though it is a civil law system and most of the same principles can be found. The Japanese prosecution can detain people for up to 23 days without bringing the case, you can't have your lawyer present when talking to the police, and by clever tactic, the prosecution can hold a person nigh-indefinitely without even filing a case. As a result, the prosecution can often get confessions, and with a confession, the actual court case can become super fast: charges are brought, the confession is read, a little extra evidence is presented, and to spare the victim a lengthy trial with the confession in the room, the judge comes down with a guilty verdict. This is compounded by how the rules of evidence are laid out: investigation and the court case are allowed to happen at the same time! As a result, the case of the prosecutor tends to become better the longer the case drags on, resulting in the defendant either settling or giving a (partial) confession to some of the charges just to get it over because lawyers are crazy expensive. By giving a confession, they throw themselves at the mercy of the court for a mild verdict. And it's very much stacked As shown above, the Japanese justice system is already stacked against the defendant. But it is even more stacked than what is shown up there. As ohwilke noted in excellent comments, I want to preserve them here: Also the vast majority of Japanese criminal cases are tried without lay judges, This is by the way a result of the Japanese legal system that was set up in the Meiji era being based on the Prussian branch of the german Civil Law school. That was one of the dominant systems of the Meiji era next to the French and Spanish schools of Civil Legal Systems - and after WW2 they did not swap to a Common Law system but stayed with their own take on this Prusso-German branch of the Civil Legal System. This means there are no juries like in the common law system, and since 2009 lay judges in japan are increasingly used, but not in every case. Those lay judges are very much akin to the Schöffen in Germany, being allowed to question the evidence and such - the German school is based on an inquisitorial system after all - but it is not used in every case. And the whole system is lived extremely differently from the inspiring Prussian system, such as this part of the comment shows: and from my experiences talking with several Japanese judges at length about the issue (back in the early 1990s, maybe it is different now), the institutional mindset is for judges to believe that all of the prosecution evidence is true and all of the defense evidence is lies unless the evidence to the contrary is overwhelming and unshakable. The level of judicial bias towards the prosecution is greater than in any other common law or civil law legal system, that is not in an authoritarian regime, in the world. This for example shows in the 23 days without charge. Technically, 23 days is not the initial time, but the police has 72 hours. But they can extend this time by 10 days with a judge's order, and then again by another 10 days on the same charge offered on the paperwork. According to a statistic, 99.8% of these requests are granted, meaning they are almost rubberstamped. Legally, people that are detained are not yet defendants, they are suspects and kept in Substitute Prisons which are located in police districts - which further helps to get confessions. And this plays directly into another factor that differentiates the Japanese system from other countries: There's a huge cultural factor, which is what makes the Japanese system so different from others. Additional factors are that police officers in Japan have much more authority to handle minor cases outside the court system and routinely do so, that a certain level of criminal conduct from organized crime and by authority figures is tolerated, that there is much less crime per capita in Japan than most places, and that Confucian values re deference to hierarchy and the Japanese specific high cultural obligation to apologize influences how Japanese people interact with the criminal justice system as defendants and as implementers of that system. This has its problems too: Because the prosecution is notoriously overworked, citizens with problems are often more reluctant to bring cases to their attention. Further, the shame culture works against not just the perpetrators, but also the victims and the people that report certain crimes - for example, a female police officer was groped on a train, and when she reported it, she became the target of shunning. Further reading &amp; Research papers US Department of Justice: Toward a Balancing Approach: The Use of Apology in Japanese Society. US Department of Justice: Confession, Apology, Repentance and Settlement Out-of-Court in the Japanese Criminal Justice System -- is Japan a Model of Restortative Justice? (From Restorative Justice in Context: International Practice and Directions, P 173-196, 2003, Elmar G. M. Weitekamp and Hans-Jurgen Kerner, eds. -- See NCJ. Hiroshi Wagatsuma, Arthur Rosett: The Implications of Apology: Law and Culture in Japan and the United States, Law &amp; Society Review, Vol. 20, No. 4 (1986), pp. 461-498 (38 pages). John O. Haley: Comment: The Implications of Apology, Law &amp; Society Review, Vol. 20, No. 4 (1986), pp. 499-508 (9 pages). DAVID ALLEN CHIYOMI SUMIDA: Japanese tradition of apology, Western worry about admitting guilt can clash, (2002). HOSOI, YOKO AND HARUO NISHIMURA: The Role of Apology in the Japanese Criminal Justice System (1999). Ernils Larsson: Confucianism as a Religion in Japan’s Courts of Law (2022). Joseph I. Lieberman: CONFUCIUS'S LESSON TO LITIGANTS New York Times (1984). Lynn Berat: The Role of Conciliation in the Japanese Legal System American University International Law Review (1992). Nicholas Lassi: A Confucian Theory Of Crime, Dissertation, University of North Dakota (2018). Graham Mayeda: [Appreciate the Difference: The Role of Different Domestic Norms in Law and Development Reform; Lessons from China and Japan] (2006). Katrina Tran: How Japan How Japan’s Cultur s Cultural Norms Aff al Norms Affect Policing: A Side-By-Side olicing: A Side-By-Side Comparison with the United States Themis: Research Journal of Justice Studies and Forensic (2017). David Brooks: The Shame Culture New York Times (2016). podcast Dan Carlin: Hardcore History 62 – Supernova in the East I (2018).
The burden for proving claims in civil actions is "preponderance of evidence," i.e., merely that "more than 50% of the evidence favors a conclusion." However, the standard for conviction of any crime is "beyond a reasonable doubt." I.e., if the defense can raise reasonable doubt about one's guilt then the defendant should be acquitted. There is quite a bit of space between the two standards, which is compounded by prosecutorial discretion to even bring criminal charges.
While there are certainly statutory and procedural vehicles for sanctions, they are almost never requested or allowed when moved for, and are almost never imposed by judges. Something very severe needs to occur and not just your typical discovery violation ("speaking objections" during depositions, being late with responses, failure to cite to affidavits, affidavits citing conjecture rather than fact, et). It would have to be something quite serious....like misleading the court or directly failing to comply with a direct order or ruling on a motion. It is exceedingly rare. It is most seen in Federal Court.
See jury-nullification. I'm not a legal historian, so I can't say for sure what the laws on jury acquittals were at that time in that jurisdiction. However, when a jury has final discretion to acquit a defendant of a crime that's it: They can effectively ignore laws if they want to acquit someone. Such acquittals do not set a precedent or have any bearing outside of the trial in which they issue their verdict.
The DA decides The decision to prosecute a crime is vested in the district attorney (a.k.a. the prosecuting attorney, a public official in charge with bringing criminal cases in court). The DA can prosecute someone even if the victim doesn't press charges. It isn't the victim's call. It isn't law enforcement's call (although the DA will never get to make that decision if neither the victim nor law enforcement tell the DA about it). Critically, in U.S. law, unlike most countries with &quot;civil law&quot; legal system in Continental Europe and Latin America and much of Asia and Africa, prosecutors don't have a legal duty to prosecute all crimes of which they are aware. Civil law systems sometimes give vetoes over prosecutions of particular kinds of crimes to victims, but the general rule is that a prosecutor must press all charges that can be proved and that the prosecutor has resources sufficient to prosecute. In the U.S., the decision to bring charges or not is in the absolute discretion of the prosecutor. Also, unless the suspect and the DA reach an express agreement to permanently drop the charges, the DA or a successor to the DA can change their mind at any time until the statute of limitations on the crime expires. In the example in the question, a DA might initially decide not to bring charges, but then change her mind and bring the charge from this incident and a lot of other ones, when the DA learns that the suspect is operating a full fledged criminal enterprise and not just exercising bad judgment on an isolated basis. The DA usually honors a victim's wishes Usually, a DA and law enforcement will honor a victim's wishes, both because it is the harm to the victim that the DA is primarily vindicating, and because a case can be hard to prosecute without the victim's cooperation. Lots of people are pressing to have scarce law enforcement and DA resources applied to their problems. When someone voluntarily withdraws their request to have the DA and law enforcement use those resources, and no one personally involved is unhappy about that, this is normally seen as a win for everyone, and as a way of empowering victims. DAs and victims alike are also well aware that a criminal case can have very severe impacts on the life of the criminal defendant and the criminal defendant's family. Sometimes it can literally ruin a person's life. Other times it presents a major bump in the road to someone who was overall getting on the right track but had a lapse of judgment. When deciding whether to bring charges, DAs routinely weigh whether the harm done by breaking the law justifies the consequences of bringing a criminal case against someone from the point of view of society as a whole in the long run. In this example, the victim got moral vindication, an apology and admission, and presumably, his stuff back. The victim and law enforcement clearly saw this as justice enough if this is really just an isolated incident in a case involving a fairly minor misdemeanor offense. Exceptions to the general rule In the unusual case where a DA brings a criminal case notwithstanding the victim wanting to drop the charges a variety of things can motivate that. Sometimes, for example, in an intrafamily domestic violence or child abuse or elder abuse scenario, the DA may conclude that the victim is asking to drop charges under duress, or figurative &quot;temporary insanity&quot; due to being blinded by love in a way that the victim will later regret. In a variation on this fact pattern, fraud victims often have lawsuits for compensatory damages against fraudsters that will be harder to collect if the fraudster is in prison and may ask to drop charges for that reason. But the DA may want to bring the criminal fraud case anyway, because it is likely that the future income that will used to pay the current victims from their lawsuit will just come from some new fraud perpetrated against someone else. Sometimes, a DA presses charges because even though the victim doesn't care, the DA or law enforcement believes that the criminal is a high risk for being a repeat offender. This is especially true in cases where the collateral consequences of a conviction (e.g. disqualification from possessing a firearm) may help to prevent a future crime. Also, keep in mind that the DA is either an elected official, or a political appointee, or reports to someone who is. Usually, victims who get what they ask for from the DA build up political support. But, sometimes, a criminal case will be popular with the general public to prosecute even if the victim doesn't want that to happen. So, that is another reason that a DA might prosecute a case over the victim's objections. Conclusion Still, the basic thing to keep in mind is that prosecutors bringing charges over the objections of the victims are the rare exception, because prosecutors do care about what victims want, and to some extent see victims as proxies for being their clients, even though their true client is the government or the abstract concept of &quot;the People.&quot; Also, victims who don't want to press charges are themselves pretty rare.
This Question Is Tricker Than It Seems One of the things about being a non-expert in a field is that it is very difficult to know in advance what is a hard question and what is an easy question. Some questions that seem like they should have simple, straight forward answers are actually very hard to answer. Some questions that seem like they should be very difficult and have involved tricky answers are actually very easy. Without an in depth understanding of the field, you just can't know in advance. It turns out that this particular question is a quite hard question to answer. So, rather than really providing a clear answer, I will explain what about this question makes it hard to answer in this answer. Even this incomplete and ultimately inconclusive answer will require far, far more words (2,078 to be exact), than were necessary to pose the question (94 words). Essentially, the core difficulty is that there are several different principles of law that apply to this fact pattern, each of which, individually have specific things that have to be proved to establish that some legal consequence will follow (which in turn are often themselves intrinsically indefinite), and each of which has exceptions that could also be proved if specific things happen. In part, this is because, while the fact pattern set forth is not freakishly unforeseeable, it is also not a fact pattern that was contemplated when any of the individual legal principles that are implicated were conceived. Likewise, the interaction of these different legal principles in one fact pattern wasn't contemplated and there is probably no one clear controlling case precedent on point that involved this fact pattern. What the law does in cases like these (which come up all the time in real life) is to break down each legal theory individually and analyze it, possibly spread over multiple distinct court cases in different courts in front of different judges. I'll try to unpack the issues (dispensing with U.K. legal terminology in some cases, since I'm only trying to provide a sense of why this is complicated and not to provide a definitive answer to how it is resolved under U.K. law). Possible Claims, Charges, and Defenses; Traffic, Civil, and Criminal It is a crime to threaten someone with weapon or in another way that puts someone at risk of imminent harm. Depending upon the weapon and other circumstances, mere possession of the weapon might be a crime in the U.K. Someone who has been threatened with weapon or in another way that puts them at risk of imminent harm can be a civil lawsuit for money damages against the person making the threat which was called &quot;assault&quot; in historical common law. Someone who has been threatened by another can seek a restraining order/protective order directing that person to stay away from them in the courts in a civil action. Hitting someone else's car is a traffic violation, unless a defense to the traffic violation is present and proven. Hitting someone else's car with a statutorily mandated level of intent is a crime, unless a justification for the crime is present and proven. The person whose car was hit could credibly argue that hitting the door was a mistake, not because the door was hit, but because the driver intended to kill them and missed, so an attempted homicide charge could raised in a criminal proceeding. The person whose car was hit could argue that there was an intend to put them in imminent risk of harm providing a basis for a civil lawsuit for money damages for common law assault. Someone whose car is hit by another car through negligence or recklessly or intentionally can bring one or more claims in a civil lawsuit against the person who car hit their car for money damages. The standard of care for negligence is established by how a reasonable person would act under the circumstances. Self-defense is a possible defense to traffic offenses, criminal charges and civil liability related to harming another's property if the conditions for self-defense apply, which include a risk of imminent harm to oneself, another, or one's property, and if the action taken in self-defense is reasonably proportional under the circumstances as evaluated by a reasonable person in response to the threat. But, if the response of the person making the threat with the weapon was as a result of actions in which the person threatened with the weapon was the true aggressor, then the privilege of self-defense would be forfeited. In real life, good attorneys for the parties could almost certainly solicit and call attention to additional facts not mentioned in the question that would further muddy the waters and raise additional claims, charges, and defenses to claims beyond the ten listed above. I could analyze each of these issues on the facts in depth as best I could with references to statutes and case law (under a body of law other than U.K. law anyway), which would take a few lengthy and heavily researched paragraphs each that would take a fair amount of time each to prepare, but I won't. A full analysis would help you weigh the odds a little better, and if I was a lawyer of a party in this situation, I would do that since every little edge counts in litigation and negotiations of settlements. But even if I did that, it would still leave a lot of uncertainty regarding the final resolution of these questions on the merits. Decision-Making Regarding Bringing Claims The traffic and criminal charges would be brought or not brought largely in the discretion of the Crown attorney or some other government official. It is most likely that a government official making that decision is doing so because the offense was referred to them by the police officer who responded to the scene, or a police officer who received an informal complaint (as opposed to a civil court filing) from one of the parties, or through a complaint delivered directly to the prosecuting authority by an alleged victim. A prosecutor doesn't have to bring claims just because someone asks them to, and doesn't have to bring all possible claims even if some are pursued. The parties themselves would decide whether or not to bring civil claims against each other. Whoever is sued first would make the decision in the context of knowing that they will be a party to a civil lawsuit whether or not they bring civil claims of their own. Possible Forums The traffic offense would probably be resolved in one court. The criminal charges against the person making the threats would be resolved in another court. The criminal charges against the person who hit the car door would be resolved probably in the same court but in a different case, possibly with a different judge. The civil claims would be resolved in yet another court, probably with a different judge, although probably in a single case with the first person to make it to court as the Plaintiff and the other party as a Defendant bringing counterclaims against the Plaintiff. The civil claims might also involve other parties (e.g. the owner of the vehicles in question if not identical to the persons driving the cars at the time of the incidents). Issue Preclusion Some final decisions on the merits in some cases would resolve the outcome of other cases as a matter of law, other final determinations in some cases would not be binding on the other cases as a matter of law because burdens of proof are different, or the legal issue evaluated is not identical, or because other rules (like a rule against a traffic court decision resulting in a binding determination on civil liability for negligence) would apply. The exact rules are rather arcane and there are quite a few permutations of how it come up, but it is important to be aware that these kinds of rules are out there, exist, and would have to be analyzed by the parties as a matter of litigation tactics. Even The &quot;Legal Issues&quot; Are Fact Intensive Inquiries Almost all of the legal theories implicated above involve broad legal standards in which a lot of the substantive question of what is or is not legal is delegated to the finder of fact in a manner that cannot be reviewed on appeal. For example, in a negligence case related to damage to an automobile, even if there is a videotape and there is 100% agreement on precisely what happened, whether that conduct constitutes &quot;negligence&quot; that breaches the duty of care owed by a reasonable person to the general public to protect them from harm, is legally considered a &quot;question of fact&quot; to be determined by a judge on a case by case basis, rather than a &quot;question of law&quot; which will always have the same outcome and is subject to review by an appellate court if the judge gets it wrong. A similar &quot;reasonable person&quot; standard which must be resolved with a highly fact intensive inquiry that could be resolved more than one way by two different judges or juries hearing precisely the same facts and finding the same witnesses and evidence to be credible in exactly the same way, with both upheld on appeal, applies to the self-defense legal theory. This self-defense issue could also conceivably, based upon the order in which cases were tried and their resolution, be resolved one way in a criminal case and a different way in a civil case between the parties. In the same vein, when a threat is imminent is a highly subjective determination that could be resolved in a &quot;legally correct&quot; way that is not subject to being overturned on appeal on precisely the same facts, with precisely the same determinations as to credibility and weight of the evidence, by two different judges or juries. Again, the substantive question of whether particular conduct is or is not illegal is a &quot;question of fact&quot; that can't be resolved in the absence of a trial on the merits in a particular case before a particular finder of fact. Bottom Line The facts provided in the question aren't sufficiently detailed to provide a definitely correct answer to this question. Indeed, the nature of the facts is such that even an perfectly detailed factual statement regarding what happened might not be enough to definitively determine who has civil liability to whom, and to determine what charges each defendant is guilty of. Different judges and jurors could reasonably come to different legally correct conclusions in a case like this one when faced with precisely the same facts and resolving all issues of credibility and the weight of the evidence in precisely the same way. This difficulty is compounded by the fact that the same facts would be analyzed with respect to different legal theory analysis in different forums by different people, when there is not, as a general rule (although there is in some cases) any mechanism for compelling those decisions to be made consistently on outcome determinative evaluations of the same facts regarding what was reasonable for the parties to do under the circumstances. The notion that a judge is just an umpire, and that every competent judge acting in good faith will always resolve a case presenting the same facts in the same way is a myth. This simply isn't true, even in the U.K. where the judiciary is (as a consequence of how the system for appointment and retention of judges is designed) not nearly as partisan and politicized as it is in the United States. The outcomes of even fairly simple cases in many cases, like the one in this question, are intrinsically and irreducibly uncertain in common law legal systems. The range of possible outcomes from a best case scenario to a worst case scenario, for each party in this fact pattern, is very wide. A desire to tame the myriad uncertainties involved for all parties, and the desire to avoid multiple time consuming and uncertain court proceedings arising out of the same incident, is one of the reasons that it is very common for civil lawsuits to settle out of court without a trial, and for criminal cases to be resolved by an agreement of the prosecution and the defense (sometimes reached even before charges are filed).
canada Or would I still be charged with his murder since it’s a different criminal instance? Yes, this is the correct intuition. Different instance/wrong; different basis for the charge; not precluded by double-jeopardy. In Canada, the term of art is autrefois convict. Section 609 of the Criminal Code lays out the standard for what it means for the count to be the same: the matter on which the accused was given in charge on the former trial is the same in whole or in part as that on which it is proposed to give him in charge The later charge for murdering Bob would be a wholly different circumstance or &quot;wrong&quot; or &quot;delict&quot; than the first conviction was based on. The later charge would not be precluded.
Are there any legal constraints on the number of times that a defendant can be retried following mistrials due to hung juries? No. A fairly recent case in Louisiana, for example, involved someone who had been tried perhaps half a dozen times resulting in a mix of hung juries and reversals of convictions on appeal. Or is the only practical constraint the willingness of the prosecutor to expend government resources (and perhaps political capital) pursuing a conviction? Yes. This is the only practical limitation.