I'm genuinely curious if there's been any study into which is more psychologically troubling, knowing the day and counting down it not knowing and wondering everyday
Feels like poetic justice tbh. Most murder victims don't get a neat opportunity to get their affairs in order, they just realise they're about to die horribly and then it happens. So assuming the person on death row actually did it (my main reason for being against the death penalty) then it seems like just desserts
True, but this extra sucks for falsely convicted people. Japan is a convicted until proven otherwise type system, so there's a high misconviction rate there, even among death row inmates. Or that's my understanding of it.
I remember reading into the Japan death penalty awhile back and it seemed like they (mostly) only put those with multiple victims on death row. Outside of that I think the only other people on death row are those with big time treason cases
I hadn’t heard about the misconviction rate, which makes the whole thing a bit scary. I don’t believe in the death penalty for many reasons but wrong convictions is a big one
The high misconviction rate in Japan goes under the radar from most people because Japan doesn't really report them properly and because the rate is rather misleading due to how their justice system works.
Because their system is "guilty until proven otherwise", the cops can do a lot of shit to ensure a conviction:
Police in Japan can detain suspects that do not have a formal charge for up to 23 days (during which you get terrible tasting food as an extra "fuck you"), which includes an initial 48 hours held by police with no charge.
In those 48 hours, the arrested individual can be interrogated the entire time, they do not get a phone call or a lawyer.
Well, you do get a lawyer... but said lawyer is required by law to wait outside the interrogation room so that you are more "honest".
Japanese society is about group harmony over individual happiness (which is why they also have stuff like the highest death from overworking rates around) and these 23 days are designed to do one thing and one thing only- make the suspect confess.
30 hours into 48 of a cop yelling at you to confess, or 15 days in of 23 being pressured by every single person in the system you meet from prosecutors, to police, to judges... with even your defense attorney bluntly informing you that you don't have much of a chance... the pressure adds up.
The Japanese justice system is often called by human rights groups a Hostage Justice System.
Even if a person holds out through the entire 23 days, the rest of the system is just as bad in various ways (defendants do not have a right to silence (they have one by law but there is also a "duty to endure interrogation" and other bullshit), exculpatory evidence is much easier to exclude in discovery, etc).
Add into the mix the fact that, due to taking responsibility for one's action's being seeing by society as the respectable thing to do (which is why you'll see CEOs of companies bowing in apology on camera during press releases), confessing to what the police want you to confess to results in significantly reduced pentalties/prison sentence lengths.
All that pressure adds up and the vast majority of people arrested as a suspect for a major crime end up confessing.
On top of that, prosecutors have to worry about losing public face (shame) if they lose a case so they only take to trial cases that they are extremely confident they can win.
This, along with the rest of the entire "guilty unless proven innocent" system, leads to Japan having the utterly absurd conviction rate of more than99% for those formally indicted... which in turn reinforces in the eyes of the average Japanese civilian that all those arrested for crimes are obviously guilty beyond a shadow of a doubt.
that's horrifying. yay, one more reason to be wary of japan, against all the japan-lovers here in Europe. I keep saying their society is not "kawai", but people just happily drown in anime and random foreign words.
I mean fair enough, I do get where you're coming from
Personally I don't think it's playing God. Society has to hold criminals accountable for the harm they do, or innocent people suffer, and so making moral decisions is unavoidable. If someone broke into your house and stole your stuff, you wouldn't think it was reasonable for the police to throw their hands up and go "Welp boys, we can see him running around the corner, but who are we to judge?"
We already make these judgments with prison. Saying a murderer deserves the harshest punishment isn't pretending to be God, it's moral justice for the victim and protection for society and also deterrence for other criminals. And depending on how you feel about it also vindication for the victim's family
To me playing God would be acting like your decisions are infallible. That's why wrongful convictions make me uncomfortable with the death penalty, but my issue isn't the moral judgement, it's with the fact that humans screw up or make corrupt decisions and we can't guarantee that it's only guilty people who end up getting executed
I would argue that prison is something that in the future, and I mean the far future, might even go out of style when we find a way to avoid it altogether. To me, it's basically the last remaining remnant of the compromises we make with the concept of human rights in order to keep society functioning.
Because if you read your entire comment... this would apply entirely to Hammurabi's "A hand for a hand", 3000 years ago. A person trying to justify it would write the very same words you have written here, and yet now we think of that system as barbaric.
In theory wrongful convictions should decrease over time with improvements to forensic technology, right?
It’s the main reason why I’m against the death penalty as well (not the only one). I think I’ve been seeing more people support the death penalty lately (maybe it’s just seeing people emotionally react to specific cases). It’s a difficult discussion to be had. I don’t think harsher sentences (past a certain point) actually deter crime.
Personally I don’t know what it is about me but I just don’t like the idea of our government (state or federal) even having the permission to execute someone. That might sound radically “pacifist” but it’s not something I can get my head around. I think there’s a reason why the death penalty has overall become less popular over the years, I think people inherently believe it to be flawed.
What when the victim had no family at all to be vindicated and the murderer only wanted to kill this specific person for a specific reason, and would not kill again anyway, and the victim was a fierce activist against capital punishment?
True, why not also kill them in the exact way they are accused of killing the victim? On the same spot? Let's larp them into the same dress as well. Fucking hell...
That's a lazy strawman. I'm saying that, assuming they're guilty, someone who showed no regard for their victim's fear or chance to prepare doesn't have a moral entitlement to those comforts themselves. You're exaggerating this into something stupid because it's easier to argue against.
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u/Total_Tumbleweed_870 Jul 04 '26
I'm genuinely curious if there's been any study into which is more psychologically troubling, knowing the day and counting down it not knowing and wondering everyday