[mc32]

Unfortunately I was talking about two things simultaneously without making the connection.

One, with professional juries (judges) a high conviction rate is achieved in Japan, possibly contributed to by the cozy relationship between attorneys and judges as well as some deficiencies in how its determined when to take a case in addition to laws and in addition to police misconduct.

One of the reasons (there were others, such as decreasing backlog) for the introduction of lay judges ("peer" jurors) was because it's thought they could prove more sympathetic to defendants.