"That's!" After scrutinizing a small part of the evidence, Maolilan frowned and expressed considerable dissatisfaction. "The police actually falsified the results of the physical evidence examination in advance before the results of the physical evidence were released, and then used them in the court hearing the next day?" She was referring to the condition of the "five pieces of clothing" that were one of the evidence of the crime: on August 31, 1967, police found a sack in Miso brewing barrel No. 1 at the Miso Factory, which contained five pieces of clothing—noteworthily, the barrel had also been inspected during a previous search, and nothing unusual had been found at the time.

What is even more noteworthy is the reaction of the prosecutor, who immediately revised the content of the previous prosecution and related statements, and used the five newly baked clothes as the criminal clothing worn by Hakamata when he committed the crime, and submitted an application for evidence to the court on September 11, requesting the start of the 17th public trial.

At around 9 a.m. on September 12, the day after the application was filed, the prosecution found a piece of cloth when searching Hakamata Yan's home, and the police department who carried out the seizure search actually stated very accurately in the report of that day that the cloth head and the black trousers in the five pieces of clothing belonged to the same color and texture: according to later records, the five pieces of clothing were still in the same state of complete stiffness as when they were taken out of the miso brewing barrel on September 12, and it was impossible to judge the texture.

An even more bizarre thing happened: on September 12, the day this evidence was discovered, the Shizuoka District Court suddenly set the date for the public trial at 2 p.m. the next day, which was completely absurd to temporarily designate the trial of the vicious murder on the next day.

Then, on September 13, in court, the prosecutor submitted the cloth found in Hakamata's hometown as the only core evidence to prove that the five pieces of clothing belonged to Hakamata, and in this way, he cleanly abandoned the bloody pajamas that he had repeatedly claimed to have been used to kill Hakamata. As for Hakamata, the defense lawyer actually chose to recognize such an abnormal chain of evidence and did not make any doubts.

If the previous thing is just strange, the following thing is ridiculous. At the court on 13 September, the prosecutor swore that the cloth and the trousers in the five pieces of clothing were made of the same fabric, but the official identification of the five pieces of clothing was not completed until 20 September, and the comparison of the cloth and trousers was not completed until more than two months later, on 4 December. At the seventeenth public trial on September 13, the prosecutor was unable to confirm the relationship between the cloth head and the trousers, and when the five pieces of clothing were claimed to belong to Hakamata on September 11, the only piece of evidence that was later used to establish this view, the "cloth head", had not even been found. And after the discovery of the cloth, the court was also very quick to set the time of the public trial to the nearest time.

Such behavior, in the eyes of onlookers, must be a little hesitant: perhaps, for the prosecutor's prosecutor's prosecutor, the police and the court where the police are located, they have long known what will happen? If we take this a step further, is the sudden appearance of five pieces of clothing that were not there at the time of the first search in front of the prosecution just perjury directed and acted by the prosecution itself?

At the same time, what is the role of the courts?

"If it weren't for such a case, Eiri wouldn't have taken it," Mori Kogoro's mood was calm now, and he didn't seem surprised by such a situation. "Don't think that prosecutors are necessarily good people, Dad was a criminal police officer and knows their methods. As for the judges...... It may be a structural problem, as the quality of their own trials is far from high, and it is not uncommon for inexperienced or inexperienced judges to be induced by aggressive and experienced prosecutors to end up in cases that are too biased in favor of the prosecution. ”

Any kind of confrontation must be composed of three parts: the players, the rules and the referee, and the same is true of the court, in the prosecution and defense, the relevant rules and laws, and the trial court. Generally speaking, as a referee, you must be familiar with the rules themselves and have enough experience, otherwise it is easy to make mistakes. Aside from relatively easy sports such as chess, most matches require referees with actual combat experience to make their judgments – perhaps sumo wrestling referees can act as referees without actual combat experience, but there is still a collegial system of judges that puts the final judgment in the hands of those who have actual combat experience.

But at the same time, the final decision in the courtroom is in the hands of judges with absolutely no practical experience.

Yes, the judge is in fact an extremely inexperienced role – both in terms of prosecution and advocacy experience, and in terms of common sense.

Japan's criminal procedure is based on the so-called "free mind", which is a "tyrant" system that leaves all discretionary power to the judge's personal judgment with few restrictions compared to the early "legal evidence system" (which fully obeys the letter of the law, similar to what we now jokingly call legal robots). If such a system is run by experienced and wise judges, it is natural that it can do its job quite well, but when judges are not capable of handling such cases, just as the ancient faint monarchs could not control the state, then serious problems will arise.

For example, Japanese judges often do not have the opportunity to communicate with the accused, and the defendants are limited in what they can express in court, so the information they can receive from the defence is not only lacking in strength but also limited in content. By contrast, they have long been accustomed to logical, well-organized, and well-structured confession investigations from the prosecution and the police. How can the evidence on one side be fragile and intermittent, while the other side's work is like a regular script without failure, so that the judges can not have a pre-position in their minds by reading the confession investigation before the trial? It is important to know that the prosecutor's only purpose is to push for a guilty verdict, and their confession investigation will not mention anything favorable to the defendant in principle, which makes the confession investigation one of the three reasons why the Japanese prosecutor has an unimaginable advantage.

Of course, this may be the most reflective one, but it is by no means the most important one.

————

In fact, during the Hakamata case, the status of the prosecution and defense was even more unequal, because the principle of leniency of guilt, which had become an iron law in 1994, was only adopted as an iron rule after the 1973 Kofu arson verdict and the 1975 Shiratori Incident special appeal rejection decision, while the 1966 Hakamata case did not enjoy such benefits, and the prosecutor only needed to provide evidence that was more impressive to the judge than the defense in order to be considered established.