This symposium was devoted to the theme "Carrying on the Tradition Begun by Kazuo Hirotsu of Matsukawa Trial Criticism." The judge in the first and second Matsukawa trials handed down convictions, including death sentences, based on mistaken verification of fact. Half a century later, judges continue to hand down erroneous verdicts. Why do judges err in their verdicts ? Panelist Sumio Hamada asserted : "The testimony analyzed by the judge is based on witness recollection of memories experienced while 'caught up in the moment.' In order to ascertain fact, the judge must first align his or her own perspective with that of the witness 'caught up in the moment' and then analyze the testimony. The erroneous verdicts are a result of the judge analyzing testimony from a position completely detached from the 'caught up in the moment' experience. This is largely a structural problem that cannot be reduced to the abilities or talents of the individual judges." Each panelist of this symposium quoted from the "Matsukawa Trials" by Kazuo Hirotsu to point out that Hirotsu places great emphasis on the state of mind and the specific circumstances of the defendants and the witnesses when considering the alibis and confessions. The criticism of the Matsukawa trials conducted by Hirotsu is a prime example of statement analysis, and legal and psychological research has much to learn from it in the area of fact verification.

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Concerning the case of the false confession of police officer, Mr. Kim, I have observed the whole process of his mental structure in view of Lacan's four discourses theory. According to Lacan's discourse theory, false confession can take place at anytime in our daily lives because our imaginary relations with others brings misunderstanding to ourselves. For the purpose of breaking the misunderstanding we have to understand the discourses of the parties involved in this case. The interrogator's attempt in this case is a discourse of the master whose aim is based on the ideology of protecting the society by eradicating crimes. The false confession by the suspect is a hysteric's discourse which means to try to control and cover his depression in the desperate situation where he feels he is not able to defend himself and avoids this situation by agreeing with, and hoping to win favor from, the interrogator. In the meantime, the discourse of the master interrogating the suspect is to be easily influenced by the discourse of science. Therefore, the imaginary wall of false confession is interwoven by the discourses of master, hysteric and science. The false confession resulted from the above discourses, making it difficult for the judge under the influence of the discourses of the master and science to break through the wall, which leads to an adverse judgment for the defendant, and thus causing him to suffer. In order to break the wall of the false confession, we need to find another discourse which is able to overcome the above discourses. The discourse of the analyst, existing asymmetrically with the other discourses, will play the role of finding the truth and breaking the imaginary falsity of confession. From the position of the analyst, the misunderstanding that all the parties in the case of Mr. Kim's false confession overlooked could be removed by the knowledge of that discourse existing in the position of the truth. Furthemore, the analyst's discourse will be helpful to solve the problems of the conventional judicial system such as interrogation, autopsy, trial, training system for judges and prosecutors by bringing to light misunderstandings inherent in this system.

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In Japanese judicial reform, the cabinet decided to submit bills concerning the new mixed jury system named "Saiban'in-seido" to the Diet. In this system, citizens will be selected from voter's lists for participating in judicial panels. And those lay persons and professional judges will deliberate serious criminal cases. In running this system, lay persons and professional judges are expected to cooperate effectively in their deliberations. To achieve effective cooperation, judges' perceptions of citizens will be important because their perception will be anticipated to affect judges' behavior. In this study, the author report results of a social survey which was conducted in mock jury trials. On these results, the author discuss aspects in which law professionals' estimation of lay persons differs depending on composition of the panels, and factors which may have effects on law professionals' estimation of lay persons. Implications for practicing Saiban'in-seido and limitations of these findings are discussed.

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Our purpose is to investigate whether participants in the juror role can ignore inadmissible evidence, which is the defendant's confession that is known to exist but has not been made public, and to see whether the participants evaluate the evidence based on the "Story Model". The murder trial scenario was shown to two groups of participants : non-students (18-70 years old : Exp 1) and students (18-25 years old : Exp 2). The results indicate that participants had a complete disregard for the inadmissible evidence and gave a decision on the defendant. The conviction rate and the evaluation on other evidences for the non-student participants (Exp 1) was influenced more by their own judgement on the admissibility of the confession rather than by the verdict. On the other hand, student participants (Exp 2) were more apt to decide on verdict, and judge's instructions and the contents of the scenario were better understood than non-students. Both student and non-student participants seemed to evaluate the evidence based on the "Story Model".

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"Saiban-in" (mixed court juror) system is an original Japanese system which will start on 2009. This study examined the effects of cognitive overload on the legitimate power of judge's guilty opinion through 3-person group decision making. To operate cognitive load, two types of crime description differing in lengths (20 pages and 7 pages) were prepared. The results suggested that participants in cognitive overload condition who had read 20-page crime description were more prone to the judge's guilty opinion, suggesting that judge's legitimate power increases when mixed court jurors are cognitively overloaded. We concluded that decreasing cognitive load in mixed court is critical for the mixed court to function satisfactorily.

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Court decisions in criminal cases are sometimes different from what a lay person thinks is appropriate as punishment for the offenders. In this study, university students were asked to read summaries of 20 real criminal cases, and judge what they thought were appropriate sentences for the accused in the cases. The students' judgments were more severe than those of the courts by an average of 3.6 to 5.3 years. Similarities between the cases were calculated using subjective ratings for features of each criminal case and analyzed using a method of multidimensional scaling (MDS). Two-dimensional representation of the cases shows that a lay person perceives a crime from its degree of "viciousness-pending circumstances" and "intentional-accidental."

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The visibility of investigation is needed for the prevention of illegal investigations of suspects. Visibility, at least the accessibility of dialogically recorded resourse, should not be limited to the investigation of the suspects, but realized in all interrogation. The present article discusses this issue from the viewpoint of forensic psychology, based on a sexual abuse case. Added to the statements of an alleged victim, tape-recorded casual conversation made by her and two teachers of her alma mater were analyzed. Included the chief elements of abuse in the later investigations, parts of the acts of abuse were often told by her as the result of the teachers' repetition of identical questions and prompts. Of the other elements of abuse, some items which did not appear in the later statements were told in the negative and one item appeared almost nowhere but in this tape were detected. If it had been made apparent that the 'victim's' statements were gradually shaped in the same course of communication as those of the tape, her statements would have been estimated as less credible. On the contrary, if it had been made apparent that the communication style of the tape was exceptional, the credibility of the statements and the appropriateness of the investigation would have been recognized. The visibility of investigation would make it clear which situations apperred and make it easier to estimate the credibility of the 'victim's' statements.

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In this paper, we attempted quantitative analyses to discriminate against different testimonies which a witness had spoken in court. The numeral indices for analyses are the average counts of characters per answer in each topic, the frequencies of the answer containing novel information, changing a topic, some features in content (for example, the testimony was dependent upon another sources), some individualities of his own expressions, and silence. In each topic, the average counts of characters per answer are different. That is, self-involved topics have more counts of characters than topics about the crime story despite pleading not guilty. He was often stuck for a reply without novel information in the period of pleading guilty, though he explained positively with novel information and changed into another topics in the period of pleading not guilty. These phenomena suggest that the witness didn't take part in the crime. So our attempt have demonstrated the witness's attitude.

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Previous researchers have shown that emotional stress elicited by shocking events facilitates memory for central information and interferes with memory for peripheral information of the event. In this study, we experimentally examined whether the centrality that moderates the effects of stress on memory is spatial or thematic. Participants of the experiment observed a series of slides that depicted either a stressful or neutral event, and then answered questions about the event that were classified by spatial and thematic centrality. The results of recall and recognition tests indicated that emotional stress facilitated memory for thematically central information and interfered with memory for thematically peripheral information. Spatial centrality did not influence the direction and size of the effects of stress on memory

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A total of 105 participants were first exposed to a series of 16 slides depicting a short story. Later, two different types of post-event information (PEI) were introduced : one was videotaped statements by eyewitnesses. The other was written statements by eyewitnesses. For each presentation condition participants were divided into two groups according to the types of information given (misinformation or consistent). After the filler task, a two-alternative forced-choice recognition test was given. The test consisted of 16 pairs of slides, each pair contained one original and one new item. Of these 16 pairs of slides, 3 of them contained target items. The result of this experiment indicate that the resistance to misinformation was stronger in the case of written statements. The reason may be that the participants in the written statement condition could read the PEI at their own pace ; and therefore it was easier for participants to detect the difference between original information and misinformation. This implies that the Principle of Discrepancy Detection worked as well in this case.

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