Participation of injured persons to judgment

Legislative Council of the Ministry of Justice has submitted a draft plan for the participation of injured persons to a court judgment. So far in any court judgments, there are no room for injured parties to participate in court judgment process at all. All they can do is to come to a court and listen to what's going on at courts. They may enter the witness-box on the request of prosecutors or defense councils but it is all what they can do as far as court process is concerned.

In this new draft plan, injured parties can participate in closing argument with prosecutors. This is really epoch-making court process which has never been tried before in Japan.

It is hard to guess the sentiment of injured people who suffered some serious
criminals such as killing or sex-related crimes against their infant children.
In such case, we often observe that those injured families worked hard to punish criminals so that they are sentenced to death at some extreme cases.

We are puzzled very much to see that those injured people even devote their life to work for making criminal sentenced to death in court judgment. We understand their real sentiment first time when we know the whole background about what happened to those injured parties.

From outsider point of vies, having such kind of sentiment of revenge seems to be a feeling of very personal one of injured party. We should never say that way just by one word. The feeling may come not only come from personal sentiment but also from social viewpoint that such crime should never be repeated again in the future without wasting lives of their families.

The public court judgments exist to punish such crimes to avoid that would not happen again in the future. Participation of injured parties to court decision is very necessary from social point of view as Legislative Council suggested.

Such injured party participation systems are already introduced in various advanced countries such as US and Europe. But there involved some basic problems to make the whole system work. The system is not to protect the basic right of suffered parties but to make fair social judgment from overall legal and social point of views.

We must wait for further discussion on the draft plan at the council so that this will become a law in near future. I personally agree with this directional movement at any rate.

2007/2/3
Tadashi HAYASE