Abstract
The paper tries (1) to describe current criminal defense practice, which has been affected by the expansion of legal practice in business and by the transformation of the court-appointed counsel system, and (2) to explore professional and institutional conditions of the current practice.
The data was obtained from mail questionnaire survey of 1, 000 lawyers conducted in 1991 (476 returned effective answers), interviews of 73 lawyears who worked as court-appointed counsel in 1990, and questionnaire research of 60 lawyers on their criminal defense activities. The all lawyers practiced in Tokyo and were selected randomly.
The court-appointed counsel was much less active both in and out of court than the retained counsel. But the activities of the retained counsel also fell short of the full assertion of the rights of the accused. The current rather inactive defense practice seems to be a result of professional and institutional factors, such as the insignificance of criminal cases for the management of law offices, the remote relationship between court-appointed counsels and their defendants, and the insufficiency of criminal defense training for lawyers.
