[epicgiga]

Factoring in plea bargaining the US and Japan have roughly the same conviction rate.

Factoring in people held in US because they can't make bail, also diminished some of the "held without trial" margin. But this is fundamentally a bigger problem in Japan, as it has now embarrassed the country on the world stage due to the Ghosn case.

A state that holds people just becauss it doesn't like them, rather than due to evidence of breaking its laws, relegates them to the same league as the North Koreas of the world. Profoundly embarrassing for a first world country and a major step backwards in reputation.

[hef19898]

Sure? I mean evidently Ghosn was a high flight risk. And whether or not his conduct was illegal or not is still not decided. For once a powerful person was close to be held for trial over stuff that was sketchy enough to be prosecuted. In a democracy. And still some people are complaining about it. Compare the Ghosn case to other scandals, like the VW emissions scandal. In the VW case it was only lower ranking managers who got charged and convicted. While the higher ups are still free and German investigators, while doing their job from what I can tell, still managed to keep VWs godfather, Ferdinand Piech, out of the story.

[epicgiga]

But who won? Even assuming Ghosn committed a crime, they ended up looking like the crooks.

And one man succeeding in shady dealings hurts few. But the state succeeding in boundless detention puts everyone in peril. He may have some power, but there is no more powerful an entity than the state.

There's a basic rule of war: slow slow, fast fast. You slowly and quietly gather your forces and telegraph nothing, and when the moment comes, you unleash it all at once and unrelentingly. That's what they should've done. Not made a move until they had the evidence to put him away.

The fact they couldn't do crap for months on end just broadcasts to the world: "we don't actually have any evidence to convict him on".

Nothing's sacred in this world, not even habeas corpus, because no one can be arsed reading history -- it was never a matter of anyone forgetting it.