タイの司法システムはめちゃくちゃすぎることがわかってきた。
訴訟法通りに手続きが進行しない。
タイの刑事訴訟では自白率が高い。
もちろん自白の強要である。
自白の強要というよりも、本人が知らないうちに自白調書ができている。
本人が最初から最後まで無罪を主張していても、無視して自白の選択肢しか与えられない。
これを警察、検察のみが強いるのではない。
最終的には、裁判所の職員が当然のごとく自白を強いた上で被告人を判事の前に送り込むのである。
被疑者が裁判を待つために収容される拘置所(刑務所の一角にある)の待遇も劣悪で、そこから出るためには自白するしかない状況に追い込まれる。
拷問と同じである。
タイの警察も検察も裁判所も、被疑者を有罪にすることしか考えていないようだ。
そして、被告人本人が即日控訴すると言っても受け付けない。
控訴状を裁判所に送り届けても無視して放置したまま。
英語で次のようなレポートがある。
High Confession Rates and Corruption in Thailand
Joel Brinkley wrote in the McClatchy Newspapers: “Once suspects here are arrested for crimes, a surprisingly high percentage of them are said to have confessed. I asked Visut Vanichbut, a major general in the Thai police, if it had ever happened that a suspect who had confessed to a crime turned out to be innocent. "Not in Thailand," he insisted with clench-jawed certainty. "They know the punishment is very serious." [Source: Joel Brinkley, McClatchy Newspapers, September 21, 2008. Joel Brinkley is a former Pulitzer Prize-winning foreign correspondent for The New York Times and now a professor of journalism at Stanford University~~]
“In other countries, however, confessions are notoriously unreliable. An organization called the Innocence Project in the United States uses DNA evidence to find innocent people who have been convicted of crimes. And after 16 years of research, the project has come up with a startling conclusion: DNA evidence shows that 25 percent of the people who confess or plead guilty to committing a crime are irrefutably innocent. The organization offers several explanations for this, among them: The suspects were coerced, drunk, mentally impaired, ignorant of the law, afraid of the police or simply exhausted after hours of aggressive interrogation. ~~
“Thailand's legal system has glaring shortcomings, too. For one thing, Thai police are thoroughly corrupt. The Asian Human Rights Commission recently noted that some criminal cases "have been deliberately concocted against innocent people in exchange for cash or favors." The commission regularly finds evidence of "torture to obtain a confession," as the group puts it. And it notes that police generally "are only interested in getting a confession, not in proper investigation." That certainly makes their jobs easier.”~~
日本も