In the 80s, I lived in Tokyo for a few years, and on my very first night there I learned first-hand about the Japanese criminal justice system, albeit it on a small and harmless scale. A friend and I had a dispute with a taxi driver, who, after assuring us that he knew the way to our inn, drove around and around in circles, clearly lost, finally ending up right back where we started. All along, he had refused to turn off his meter. Being young, and maybe not too smart, we refused to pay for his mistake; hence the dispute. We took our suitcases and walked a couple of blocks and stumbled onto our inn, where we settled onto the sofa in the lounge with a cup of green tea and watched “The Odd Couple” dubbed in Japanese on TV.

Soon the front door slid open with a bang and four Japanese policemen rushed in, pausing only to exchange their shoes for slippers, our grumpy old taxi driver bringing up the rear. In a country with a very low crime rate, we were Public Enemy Ichiban. They took us down to the station in separate patrol cars and put us in separate interrogation rooms. Their manner was cold to hostile. Great, I thought, I’m about to set some kind of record for quick deportation.

The one smart thing I had done was to read a book on Japanese history and culture on the way over. One phrase in particular had stuck with me: “sincere repentance.” If you wanted leniency from the authorities in Japan, you had to be sincerely repentant. So we apologized and offered to pay the fare, and it was like a switch flipped and night turned to day. The cops were suddenly our best friends, joking with us, asking us if it was true that everyone in New York carried a gun (of course, we said), and they went out of their way to drop us off at a restaurant they recommended.

It was a good thing it was all over a taxi fare and not a murder. Sincere repentance is all well and good if you’re guilty, but what if you’re innocent and the stakes are high? Presumption of innocence appears not to be a mainstay of the Japanese criminal justice system. If you’re in the police’s grasp, it’s because they think you did it, and what they want to hear is sincere repentance, not your denials. From that, the interrogation tactics flow.

In 1991, Toshikazu Sugaya was accused of murdering a child after a witness said he had been at the pachinko parlor where the child was last seen. After a 13-hour confession, during which he said the police kicked him, Sugaya confessed, and he spent the next 17 years in prison for a crime he didn’t commit. He was exonerated and released last year after prosecutors admitted that his confession was coerced and that a DNA test used in support of the conviction was faulty. “Before, I was famous for being a criminal. Now I’m famous for being innocent,” Sugaya said.

Awareness of false confessions appears to be reaching a critical mass in Japan, where the highest court recently ordered a retrial for two men who had been serving life sentences in a 1967 murder-robbery case. A recent editorial by the Asahi newspaper cites a number of cases that “have raised serious questions.” One of the cases wasbig news in 2007, involving an alleged vote-buying scheme by 13 middle-aged to elderly men and women. Six confessed, but all were eventually acquitted when a local court found that their confessions had been coerced, making “confessions in despair while going through marathon questioning,” according to the presiding judge.

Japan has an astounding conviction rate of over 99%, and an estimated 90% of convictions are achieved through confessions. Hence, confessions are known in Japan as the “King of evidence.” With police able to hold suspects for up to 23 days before they are charged, and with prosecutors only proceeding with a case if they are sure they can win, you can see how psychological and cultural dynamics like “sincere repentance” are exploited.

“The detective grabbed my ankles so I gripped the chair thinking he was about to pull me off it,” said Sachio Kawabata, one of the suspects in the vote-buying case. “He said to the other detective, ‘Kawabata has no blood or tears,’ meaning I was cruel, I had no feelings.” “Look, he can tread on his fathers and grandchildren,” the detective reportedly said as he made Kawabata stomp on a paper with the names of his family on it, a shameful act in Japanese culture. In Japan , as in every other culture, a suspect has his limits. As the book “Torture and Democracy” puts it, “In a society where sincere repentance matters, a confession generates ninjo, warmth and understanding, in officials, thereby lessening the severity of punishment.”

There are signs of reform happening. The jury system, which was suspended during World War II, has been reinstated, which is expected to counterbalance some of the power of prosecutors. And many are calling for the recording of interrogations: “They should squarely deal with growing calls to make the interrogation process ‘visible’ to outsiders,” as the Asahi editorial put it. Without a doubt, awareness of false confessions is increasing, which can only help. Masayuki Suo, the director of the hit film “Shall We Dance,” wrote and directed “Sore Demo Boku Wa Yatte Nai” (“I Just Didn’t Do It”), based on the true story of a young man who falsely confessed to a sexual assault.

For now, though, interrogation remains an unfortunate universal language, and confessions, too often false, remain the King of Evidence in Japan .

U.S. Supreme Court Makes it Easier To Obtain False Confessions

Paul House was freed last year after serving 22 years on death row in Tennessee, as a result of the United States Supreme Court’s precedent-setting House v. Bell decision, which overturned his conviction and established a crucial precedent in the rights of the convicted to present new evidence of their innocence.

What the Court giveth, the Court taketh away.

In the most recent Supreme Court session, according to the AP, the court placed limits on the Miranda protections in three separate decisions. These decisions more than chip away at the Miranda rights of suspects; they also increase the ability of the police to obtain a false confession. Jeffrey Fisher, co-chair of the amicus committee for the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers (NACDL), thinks the Court’s Miranda decisions will make it easier for police to get confessions out of people who don’t want to confess. “Those decisions open up ways for cops to work around Miranda,” says Fisher.

In one decision affecting how long Miranda rights are valid, the court made it clear that these rights last just two weeks. After 14 days, it is up to the individual to remain silent, request a lawyer or refuse to answer questions without the police having to repeat Miranda warnings. And, based on another decision, suspects must acknowledge that they invoke their Miranda protections to remain silent…by not remaining silent. Essentially, unless they tell the interrogators that they intend to remain silent to cut off questioning, any utterance waives the Miranda protections.

According to the Washington Post, “In the case before the court, suspect Van Chester Thompkins was read his rights and, at police request, repeated some of them out loud. But he did not sign an offered waiver of the right, and he did not acknowledge that he was willing to talk. Nor did he say that he wanted the questioning to stop.

Detectives persisted in what one called mostly a “monologue” for about two hours and 45 minutes, until one asked Thompkins whether he believed in God. At a follow-up question — “Do you pray to God to forgive you for shooting that boy down?” — Thompkins answered “Yes” and looked away.

The statement was used against him, along with other testimony, and Thompkins was convicted of killing Samuel Morris outside a strip mall in Southfield, Michigan.

While the court’s decisions might seem reasonable to some, they do not reflect real life situations where the power of the police during the interrogation process can result in false confessions. Police can lie while questioning suspects, according to the Supreme Court, and routinely do so to obtain confessions. These recent decisions place the onus on suspects to know the law and protect themselves from police tactics that can coerce incriminating statements from uneducated, youthful and mentally challenged suspects, whether they are guilty or not.

The only way to prevent a false confession, a wrongful conviction, an innocent person incarcerated often for life, and the guilty from remaining free, is to have stronger, not weaker, protections during the interrogation process. Some jurisdictions have even come around to supporting the video recording of interrogations in order to prevent the wrong person from being prosecuted, which is an important step in the right direction. Unfortunately, in this session, the Supreme Court has taken a step backward.

In 1991, a teenager named Stephen Brodie was arrested in the Dallas suburb of Richardson for stealing quarters from a soda machine. Brodie was deaf, which made him ill-equipped for dealing with the police, who, in an 18-hour interrogation, accused Brodie of the unsolved sexual assault of a five-year-old girl, despite the lack of physical evidence linking Brodie to the crime scene.

Brodie denied it but eventually gave up and confessed. “It was a lot of stress, because (the detective) was asking me so many questions over and over again,” Brodie told the Associated Press. “I got fed up. I gave up. It”s easy to give up.”

Brodie and his lawyer saw which way the wind was blowing, so to avoid a 99-year sentence, he cut a deal and pled guilty, ultimately serving 10 years.

While Brodie served his term, Richardson police found a fingerprint on the victim”s window that was a match for a man Dallas police said was responsible for a string of sexual assaults in the early 90s. But Richardson police dismissed the evidence and a judge ruled on appeal that Brodie”s confession outweighed the new evidence.

Brodie”s luck is not all bad. He is in Dallas County, where DA Craig Watkins has instituted the nation”s first “Conviction Integrity Unit,” and they are on the case.

“If they find me not guilty and I”m exonerated, I”m getting out of Texas,” said Brodie.

Chicago Police commander Lt. Jon Burge finally had his day in court, albeit 25 years too late to protect the 100 mostly African American and Hispanic men who have long claimed they had confessions beaten out of them by an infamous South side Chicago detective squad led by Burge. From the 1970s through to his forced retirement in 1993, Burge led a group of detectives whose actions in obtaining false confessions from defendants in murder and serious crime cases led to long prison terms for most and even death sentences for some of them. A federal jury has now found Burge guilty of perjury and obstruction of justice in connection with the torgure allegations.

The abuse of suspects was so notorious that former Illinois Governor George Ryan released four men from death row who he believed had their confessions tortured out of them at the hands of Burge and his fellow police officers. Ryan would go on to suspend Illinois”s death penalty and release all prisoners from death row.

According to the testimony of victims at Burge”s trial, police obtained confessions from defendants by applying electric shocks to their genitals, suffocating them, threatening them with loaded guns and burning them on radiators. Burge now faces a long prison term himself after being prosecuted by the Department of Justice for perjury and obstruction of justice for lying in a civil suit against the City brought by Madison Hobley, one of the men sentenced to death as a result of being tortured into confessing to the murder of his wife and son. Hobley was innocent.

But this case is not over for the scores of victims of Burge and the Chicago criminal justice system. And especially not for the 22 people still imprisoned in Illinois who have already served long prison sentences based upon tortured confessions. They include: Tony Anderson, Franklin Burchette, Eric Caine, Javan Deloney, Terry Harris, Leonard Hinton, Edward James, Eric Johnson, Grayland Johnson, Leonard Kidd, James Lewis, Jerry Mahaffey, Reginald Mahaffey, Johnny Plummer, Virgil Robinson, Ivan Smith, Robert Smith, Vincent Wade, Keith Walker, Demond Weston, Jackie Wilson, and Stanley Wrice.

For more, see: JailJonBurge.org