In February 1992, the murder known as the Iizuka case occurred. Two six-year-old schoolgirls went missing on their way to school. The next day, they were found dead. Two days later, their belongings were found. In September 1994, Michitoshi Kuma, 54, of Iizuka city was arrested for the murder on the basis of the DNA tests and fiber identification of samples from the girls' clothes. Despite consistently denying that he had committed the crime, he was prosecuted for murder and sentenced to death at the District Court, the High Court, and the Supreme Court. In October 2008, Kuma was executed only two years after the judgment had become final and binding. In October 2009, an appeal was made for a retrial, and from September 2014 up to now, the court has been considering whether this case should be permitted to be retried. Thus far, this trial has revealed the following facts: (1) The National Research Institute of Science, which is a laboratory of the National Police Agency, committed data falsification and withheld information from the DNA tests they conducted and became a Key piece of evidences in the conviction. (2) A judicial police officer visited Kuma's house and investigated and gathered details on Kuma's car and wrote a report about it. Prior to this, the crime investigation team found a witness who insisted he had seen a suspicious person and a vehicle near the scene where the girls' belongings were found on the day the girls went missing. The officer who made the report on Kuma was the same officer who interviewed and took down the statement from the witness. This interview took place two days after the officer had gathered and been privy to significant details regarding Kuma's car.

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To evaluate the accuracy of Mr. T's eyewitness statements in the Iizuka case (1992), the author conducted a psychological investigation. In this case, two elementary schoolgirls were kidnapped and murdered. The day after the kidnapping, two dead bodies were found in the mountain area of Amagi city. Mr. T was a star eyewitness, and his written statements about what he had seen were made 17 days after he observed first-hand a one-box type navy blue car and an unknown person. The location where he witnessed the events was where the property of the two girls was found. His statements about the person and the car were very detailed although he saw both by driving a small car. Other conditions were also poor for viewing the scene clearly. The defense questioned whether his statements were actually too detailed. A field experiment was carried out to test whether it would be possible to obtain similar details as those made in Mr. T's statements. Results showed that no one could report the degree of detail as Mr. T had done.

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How should we understand the relation between a conviction for which an error has now become known and forensic evidence analysis that upholds the conviction? For example, in the Ashikaga case and the Iizuka case, there were errors in the DNA tests at the time. Therefore, the erroneous convictions in those cases and the DNA tests that supported the convictions cannot be justified due to "the limitations of science at that time." However, a recent study by the Judicial Research and Training Institute justified two fact-finding methods: that based on "forensic evidence under development" and other evidence and that based on the sole "ultimate" DNA test. These methods share some common features, such as that they originated from the desire to make it convenient to provide proof and do fact-finding, they make the burden for the defense too heavy, and they can lead to erroneous convictions. This paper discusses criminal fact-finding based on circumstantial evidence that involves forensic evidence analysis, and makes the claim that there must be multiple evidentiary materials, and that evidentiary facts that infer facts in issue firsthand must be proved beyond a reasonable doubt.

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The tendency to respect the sentence issued in a saiban-in trial at the second instance has become typical more than four years after the saiban-in system was implemented. However, this does not mean that sentences from saiban-in trials should not be changed. There are some cases in which the judgment from a saiban-in trial was reversed at the second instance on grounds of unreasonable sentencing. This special report is a summary of an open symposium held on October 13, 2013, at the 14th Convention of the Japanese Society for Law and Psychology in Fukuoka. This symposium aimed to analyze the causes of unreasonable sentencing in the saiban-in trial from the perspective of law and psychology and to seek more suitable standards for reviewing sentences from the saiban-in trial at the second instance.

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This paper deals with a framework for reviewing the sentencing for a saiban-in trial by the court of second instance. First, the paper discusses reversed cases according to Article 397 paragraph 1 or 2 of the Code of Criminal Procedure (including the Osaka Asperger's case and two reversed capital cases). Second, the legitimacy of the saiban-in trial's sentencing is theoretically analyzed. In conclusion, a framework is provided for reviewing the sentencing in saiban-in trials on the basis of the facts of sentencing, such as mental condition, age, remorse, and previous conviction on the one hand, and the victim's feelings and the possibility of rehabilitation of the offender on the other hand. In particular, in cases of attempted rape, forcible indecency, and injury leading to death, the reasons of the people doing the sentencing should be critically reviewed.

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In this paper, I discuss some social-psychological issues that might result from the recent introduction of the citizen-judge (Saiban-in) system in Japan. This new system was in part intended to reflect ordinary citizens' naive and/or intuitive views on the judicial system. First, I address the potential influence of cognitive biases and their effect on sentencing judgments, including (1) the danger of cognitive biases such as the anchoring and adjustment heuristic that can influence judgments not only among lay citizens but also among legal experts; (2) the impact of effects, such as regret and pity, resulting from counterfactual thinking elicited by "abnormal" (vs. normal) events; (3) the effects of the "correspondence bias," which exaggerates the role of an actor's disposition (e.g., traits, motives, and intentions) in the causal explanation of an act; and (4) the likely impact of dispositional attributions in highlighting the defendant's personal character and thereby leading to harsh punishment. I then compare utilitarian and retributive views as the bases for punitive motives. The implications of basic research in social psychology for the actual judicial system are also discussed.

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In Japan, there is no restriction on crime reporting by the media from the perspective of the right to free expression. However, Fuchino (2007) pointed out that some content of Japanese pretrial publicity (PTP) leads to prejudice against the defendant, and that it also provides the criminal trials of injustice by prejudiced jurors. The Japanese Justice Ministry (2009) suggested that professional judges instruct the jurors to ignore inadmissible information. Thus, they claimed that the media regulation is not necessary about this problem. This study examined the effect of the professional judge's instruction (JI) that ignores the PTP in criminal cases in which citizens' act as jurors. We compared two types of JI. The first instruction included the theoretical explanation of evidence law that inadmissible evidence should be ignored, and the second instruction did not include the detail of evidence law, it was only instructed to ignore the inadmissible evidences. In experiment 1, we compared the two types of PTP that Fuchino (2007) discussed, the inadmissible confession and the crime record of the defendant. The results showed that the both JI did not have the effect of ignoring the PTP of the inadmissible confession. Experiment 2 examined the effect of the JI on the popular representation in the newspaper media. The results showed that the JI that included an explanation of evidence law led jurors to a not guilty judgment on this type of JI.

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Wells and Bradfield (1998) reported that witnesses who received confirming feedback ("Good, you identified the suspect") tended to show (a) a clearer view of the crime and crime scene, (b) higher quality memory, (c) high confidence in recounting events, and (d) a willingness to testify at trial. These phenomena are called the "postidentification-feedback effect (PIFE)." We conducted two experiments to investigate whether PIFE could be replicated (Experiment 1) and to observe the aftereffects using a semistructured interview (Experiment 2). In both experiments, the PIFE were confirmed. In addition, we tried to interpret these results in terms of the selective cue integration framework (Charman, Carlucci, Vallano, & Gregory, 2010) in order to confirm the correlation. We found that the reports from our participants supported the framework. However, it was suggested that the framework could not explain the influence of pressure imposed by the interviewer. Further studies are needed to verify the other factors that affect the PIFE.

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