The one of the strongest and clearest impact of the Lay Judge System in Japan has been seen in sex crime lay judge trials. Since the introduction of the system, sentencing for sex crime has been increasing. It seems that there has been a great “gap” between what lay people think is the proper sentence for sex offenders and the opinions of professional judges. Also, there are new challenges for victims of sex crime as they now have to be faced with lay people who may be acquaintances of victims. In this paper, I analyze various issues in sex crime lay judge trials. Those are, how and why impacts on sentencing has been seen, victims issues, whether sex crimes should not be tried by lay judge trials, and gender issues of lay judges. In order to do so, I used the data I had collected on the lay judge trials for sex crime cases (n=205) over a 2 year period since the system launched. It seems that many of challenging issues of the Lay Judge System are condensed and strongly seen in sex crime lay judge trials, so it can be said that sex crime trials are one of the most controversial areas of the System. The goal of my research is to reveal impacts, present issues and future prospect of the System through reviewing those 205 sex crime lay judge trials.
