[escherplex]

However, the above link does point out a convention ripe for abuse:

Because suspects are put through continuous interrogation which could last up to 23 days as well as isolation from the outside world, including access to lawyers, both the Japanese judiciary and the public are well aware that confession of guilt can easily be forced.

[dmix]

The Nissan CEO wasn't allowed to see or contact his family/friends for 3 months while he was in jail. Which he spent entirely in solitary.

People without good lawyers and a strong grasp of the law would be far more liable to just give in.

[Defenestresque]

The point the articles continues to make is actually the opposite of what you're implying, the very next sentence says:

Consequently, the court (and the public) take the view that mere confession of guilt alone is never any sufficient ground for conviction.

Instead, for confession to be a valid evidence for conviction, the Japanese court requires confession to include revelation of verifiable factual matter which only the perpetrator of the crime could have known such as the location of an undiscovered body or the time and place the murder weapon was purchased, a fact about the crime scene, etc. Furthermore, to safeguard against the possibility that the interrogator implanting such knowledge into confession, the prosecutor must prove that such revelation of secret was unknown to the police until the point of confession.

I find this fascinating. Specifically, this part:

While it is impossible for an innocent suspect to reveal relevant information about a crime even under severe torture, a guilty suspect is likely to crack under prolonged interrogation in isolation and make a damning confession. Activists claim that the Japanese justice system (and Japanese public to some extent) consider that prolonged interrogation of suspect in isolation without access to lawyers is justified to solve the criminal cases without risking the miscarriage of justice.

This is so completely unlike any western approach to justice that is familiar to me that I cannot pass any judgment on it without knowing its efficacy relative to percentage of false confessions.

The argument of this technique's validity is somewhat undermined in the next paragraph where the authors notes that false confessions still happen, so I'll definitely give you that!

As an aside, as someone upthread alluded to, this is a fascinating example of an article that breaks almost all of the Wikipedia editing rules but is surprisingly informative.. probably more informative than it would have been if it omitted the synthesis and OR

[dragonwriter]

> While it is impossible for an innocent suspect to reveal relevant information about a crime even under severe torture

This is, of course, untrue; desperate, babbling can be accurate by coincidence; if you do enough torturing of innocent people, you'll get a measurably-different-from-zero rate of accurate, previously unknown information.

> This is so completely unlike any western approach to justice that is familiar to me

The desire for sufficient proof of guilt before passing criminal sentence is very similar to the theory of proof underlying the utterly pervasive use of torture in some Western systems in the early modern period (which for serious offenses tended to require clear proof like the two-witnesses-to-the-same-overt-act rule still enshrined in the US Constitution for treason, but allowed weaker indications to be validated by a confession extracted under torture, so long as “freely” confirmed thereafter.)