Prosecution Review Commissions, the Public Interest, and the Rights of the Accused: The Need for a Grown Up in the Room

The recent amendments to Japan’s Inquest of Prosecution Law (popularly called the Prosecution Review Commission (“PRC”) Law) give the eleven lay member PRC (and their court appointed lawyers) unreviewable authority to compel the prosecutions and appeals of defendants who the professional prosecutor service has determined do not require indictment and prosecution. Viewed as “democratic” because it brings lay participation to the criminal justice system, the PRC process differs sharply from the American Federal Grand Jury because it places ordinary citizens at risk of potential retribution and the political system at risk of possible “gaming” of the process for political advantage, much as was the case with the Special Prosecutor’s Law in the United States. To date, PRCs have compelled prosecution of five defendants (of whom two have been found not guilty), one indictment has been dismissed, one defendant is being tried for professional negligence after the professionals on whose advice he relied were found not guilty (in a prosecution by professional prosecutors), and one is on trial despite a serious statute of limitations question. The indictment of a powerful political figure (found not guilty but the court appointed prosecutors have appealed) had serious political repercussions in Japan and caused political turmoil in the first non-Liberal Democratic Party majority elected party and government in the Post War era. This article reviews the PRC experience in comparison to the U.S. experience with the Special Prosecutor Law and the prosecutions mandated by the PRC to date. Five changes to the PRC process are suggested that, while allowing citizen participation in the indictment and prosecution process, would preserve the rights of those accused and protect the national interest

Contemplated Amendments to Japan\u27s 1947 Constitution: A Return to Iye, Kokutai and the Meiji State

The post World War II American Occupation of Japan was a huge programmatic success. Its disarmament, repatriation, land reform, and health programs put a defeated Japan on the road to recuperation, while providing a military shield that enabled Japan to focus on recovery from the War and rebuilding the country and economy. Perhaps its most enduring legacy was its Enlightenment-based, American-drafted, rights-oriented Constitution of 1947 [hereinafter “the Constitution”]. Drafted in English, the Constitution was promulgated in Japanese, resulting in some substantive changes. Among the most important of these were changing the English word “people” into the Japanese “kokumin” (Japanese citizens) and transmuting many definitive rights into more passive language

Causal criteria and counterfactuals; nothing more (or less) than scientific common sense

Two persistent myths in epidemiology are that we can use a list of "causal criteria" to provide an algorithmic approach to inferring causation and that a modern "counterfactual model" can assist in the same endeavor. We argue that these are neither criteria nor a model, but that lists of causal considerations and formalizations of the counterfactual definition of causation are nevertheless useful tools for promoting scientific thinking. They set us on the path to the common sense of scientific inquiry, including testing hypotheses (really putting them to a test, not just calculating simplistic statistics), responding to the Duhem-Quine problem, and avoiding many common errors. Austin Bradford Hill's famous considerations are thus both over-interpreted by those who would use them as criteria and under-appreciated by those who dismiss them as flawed. Similarly, formalizations of counterfactuals are under-appreciated as lessons in basic scientific thinking. The need for lessons in scientific common sense is great in epidemiology, which is taught largely as an engineering discipline and practiced largely as technical tasks, making attention to core principles of scientific inquiry woefully rare

The missed lessons of Sir Austin Bradford Hill

Austin Bradford Hill's landmark 1965 paper contains several important lessons for the current conduct of epidemiology. Unfortunately, it is almost exclusively cited as the source of the "Bradford-Hill criteria" for inferring causation when association is observed, despite Hill's explicit statement that cause-effect decisions cannot be based on a set of rules. Overlooked are Hill's important lessons about how to make decisions based on epidemiologic evidence. He advised epidemiologists to avoid over-emphasizing statistical significance testing, given the observation that systematic error is often greater than random error. His compelling and intuitive examples point out the need to consider costs and benefits when making decisions about health-promoting interventions. These lessons, which offer ways to dramatically increase the contribution of health science to decision making, are as needed today as they were when Hill presented them

Lead editorial: The need for greater perspective and innovation in epidemiology

This editorial introduces the new online, open-access, peer-reviewed journal, Epidemiologic Perspectives & Innovations. Epidemiology (which we define broadly, to include clinical research and various approaches to studying the health of populations) is a critically important field in informing decisions about the health of individuals and populations. But the desire for new information means that the health science literature is overwhelmingly devoted to reporting new findings, leaving little opportunity to improve the quality of the science. By creating a journal dedicated to all topics of and about epidemiology, except standard research reports, we hope to encourage authors to write more on the neglected aspects of the field. The journal will publish articles that analyze policy implications of health research, present new research methods and better communicate existing methods, reassess previous results and dogma, and provide other innovations in and perspectives on the field. Online publishing will permit articles of whatever length is required for the work, speed the time to publication and allow free access to the full content