They helped someone escape house arrest in Japan. Then they returned to the US. The US and Japan are close allies with an extradition treaty.
What did they expect to happen?
With the situations reversed: if a Japanese citizen helped break an American out of house arrest before fleeing back to Japan, I would be shocked if America didn't pursue extradition.
From an ethical perspective, it matters that the Japanese criminal system has a 100% conviction rate and even the judge thinking the defendant is innocent won't result in an acquittal.
Not really what most people would expect when you say 100%
> According to them, Japanese prosecutors will prosecute only the very few cases in which they are most likely to be guilty and not many others.[2][3][4] According to Ryo Ogiso, a professor at Chuo University, prosecutors suspend prosecution for 60% of cases they receive, and end prosecution for the remaining 30% through a simplified judicial process. Only about 8% of cases are actually prosecuted, and this low prosecution rate is the reason for Japan's high conviction rate.[3][5]
The conviction rate is 99.3%. By only stating this high conviction rate it is often misunderstood as too high—however, this high conviction rate drops significantly when accounting for the fact that Japanese prosecutors drop roughly half the cases they are given. If measured in the same way, the United States' conviction rate would be 99.8%.
One thing to note is they can detain you for up to 23 days without a charge (subject to extension) and during that time you may of may not be able to speak to a lawyer and during this time sometimes they get detainees to “confess”.
Mr Ghosn got some concessions only because he had some influence.
In the US it’s a bit different, prosecutors throw as many counts as they can in hopes the accused will plea-deal for a lesser charge.
Speaking as a complete non-expert, I don't find that a satisfactory/comforting answer.
Just a quick google search shows prosecutors in the US also selectively choose which cases to prosecute (it appears there are around 4x as many cases get dismissed than go all the way to a jury trial), but nonetheless there are many meritless cases that do somehow make it to trial anyways.
I could accept that Japanese prosecutors are a bit better at filtering, but a 99.3% conviction rate does not seem right.
Why not? You'd prefer the prosecutors to waste their time trying to prosecute cases where they're most likely to lose? Instead, they either drop those cases, or try to arrange some other settlement before getting to trial.
There's many things seriously wrong with the Japanese judicial system, but this isn't one of them.
Even if that represents a difference from the US, it's irrelevant. It would do a lot of harm to the US-Japan relationship if the US let such a serious and blatant crime go unpunished. This sort of cross-border crime is exactly what the extradition process exists for.
This isn't really much different than the US federal prosecution rate. Prosecutors in these positions generally won't attempt to convict someone unless they know that they have an airtight case.
From an ethical perspective, it matters that the US criminal system treats prisoners inhumanely. Therefore, it is OK if foreign citizens in allied countries like Japan come in and break people like Bernie Madoff out. Especially if it's done not primarily based on ethics, but because the accused has paid large sums of money to do it.
JNOV - Judgement notwithstanding of verdict -- is a thing.
Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure, Rule 29(c):
(2) Ruling on the Motion. If the jury has returned a guilty verdict, the court may set aside the verdict and enter an acquittal. If the jury has failed to return a verdict, the court may enter a judgment of acquittal.
Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, Rule 50:
(1) In General. If a party has been fully heard on an issue during a jury trial and the court finds that a reasonable jury would not have a legally sufficient evidentiary basis to find for the party on that issue, the court may ... (B) grant a motion for judgment as a matter of law against the party on a claim or defense that, under the controlling law, can be maintained or defeated only with a favorable finding on that issue.
I qualified with largely. Rule 29 requires more than the judge disagreeing with the verdict. Basically the judge must find that there’s NO WAY a reasonable jury could find the defendant guilty.
But if the prosecution’s case was that weak, the judge probably would have granted the defendant’s Rule 29 motion at the close of the prosecution’s case.
It's not irrelevant. What's most immediately relevant, however, is whether the judge thinks innocence is so clear that no reasonable jury could convict. In such a case the judge is obliged to declare a mistrial or enter an aquittal. The technical way to put this is that innocence is always presumed, and the judge has the final say over whether guilt has been adequately proven.
It gets lost amidst a mountain of doctrine and procedure, but even in Common Law systems one of the principal functions of a trial, and the judicial office generally, is establishing the truth, just as in continental European systems. Trial procedure is primarily adversarial, but judges absolutely have the power to independently seek the truth. One of the most common ways this manifests in a jury trial is the judge directly posing questions to witnesses. (Judges don't habitually ask questions as merely posing questions could potentially prejudice a defendant--who may be, for example, strategically avoiding some subject matter--and especially in a jury trial judges must be careful to maintain the appearance of impartiality so as not to influence or lose the faith of juries.)
Because in Common Law systems investigative and prosecutorial powers are typically held and executed by another branch of government (or at least another party, public or private), judicial discretion naturally tends to be confined to courtrooms. But historically, and today even in many rural areas with limited government services, judges' roles can be more expansive, fundamentally deriving from their function of establishing the truth.
EDIT: A legal note on Federal Rules of Evidence 614 (Calling and Interrogation of Witnesses by Court) I put together many years ago for my Evidence class: https://25thandClement.com/~william/Evidence/614.pdf For the broader principle at play, see footnote 2 citing the most eminent American scholar of Evidence, John Wigmore, as saying that courts have a duty to "to elicit the truth more fully"; and the statesman Edmund Burke arguing even more broadly that, "A Judge is not placed in that high situation merely as a passive instrument of parties: He has a duty of his own, independent of them, and that duty is to investigate the truth."
According to the article they were thinking that evading house arrest wasn’t as bad as murder and US usually only extradite those kinds of crimes to Japan when they rarely do an extradition.
> Complicating matters, perhaps, was Michael Taylor’s decade-old plea deal over an investigation into a Pentagon contract that he won to train Afghan special forces troops.
I want to learn more about this part.
You have to pretty severely fuck up in federal government/DoD contracting to get prosecuted and need to take a plea deal over some services you rendered (or didn't render properly) in an overseas military mission.
“They betrayed us” - Michael Taylor on both Trump and Biden administrations for unwillingness to shield him and his son from extradition to Japan to face criminal system there for orchestrating, successfully executing, and profiting from an escape of wealthy criminal from Japan.
I am struggling to understand which part of that brief description of events is supposed to elicit my sympathy for the victims of the alleged betrayal? The way I see it - “they served public interest” is what I would have said.
Personally I’d like criminals, especially if they happen to be wealthy, to face justice just the same. And those who commit crime in an effort to help them avoid that fate in exchange for a share of that wealth - to face justice doubly so.
Strange how Mr. Taylor doesn’t see it the same way. I’d be interested to hear him present a moral argument from his perspective to understand how he interprets this situation.
I am a little bit out of the loop. A several years back Ghosn was a fairly respected business figure in both France and Japan, which is even more extraordinary for a non-japanese exec.
What happened from there, was there actual corruption or did he piss off the wrong people in Japanese business?
The Japanese sabotaged him to get ride of the French influence on Nissan which is kind of ironic considering that’s what saved them in the first place. They are now doing their best to sabotage Renault’s chances in the EV market. It’s an interesting lesson of international business: don’t ally with the Japanese.
"In 2014, Emmanuel Macron, then France’s economy minister, pulled a devious stunt under the country’s protectionist Florange Law which doubled the voting rights attached to the French state’s 15 per cent stake in Renault. If this had stood, it would have given the French government ultimate control over Nissan, making it hostage to French political exigencies such as unemployment or the agitations of the gilets jaunes. In the end, Macron’s power grab was limited by the Nissan board, with Ghosn’s support, but the manoeuvre shook the Japanese, and played into suspicions of yet more perfidious designs on the part of the French."
That’s just LRB garbage. The Florange Law is not protectionist. It’s in favour of long term investments. That’s the usual right wing tosh from the UK press.
The Florange Law doubles the voting rights of everyone holding shares for more than 2 years. That includes the Nissan shares in Renault so the balance between Nissan and the French state remained exactly the same. Plus Renault only holds 45% of Nissan. They don’t have a majority.
They were ex US special forces operatives. They knew exactly what they were doing and the consequences of their actions. Nothing unfair or surprising here except that weren't more careful to avoid getting caught.
Why did the Taylors names become public? Were they identified as smugglers after reviewing airport security footage or did they go out of their way to brag about it?
I remember there were a lot of stories about the heist back when it happened, but it is only now I'm actually questioning why we know so much about the heist.
Based on the article, it appears that Ghosn wants to pay them additional money (3 million dollars at least) as compensation for their troubles over the last 2 years. Seems like they will be well compensated, totaling over 4 million dollars in payments, not to mention any TV appearance fees or book and movie deals.
> it appears that Ghosn wants to pay them additional money
I feel like what Ghosn is quoted saying sounds more like "I don't want to admit that I don't want to pay" rather than "I am planning to pay additional compensation"
But regardless, the story goes on and hasn't become less interesting.
Next chapter might even be called "revenge" where we see a father/son team abduct a wealthy business man from Lebanon to bring him to Japan if he doesn't pay up.
In the USA, you're supposed to be banned from profiting from any crimes you did ("Son of Sam law"). I wonder if that would apply in this case, given that they were presumably convicted outside of US jurisdiction.
>you're supposed to be banned from profiting from any crimes you did ("Son of Sam law")
Not sure where you got this from? AFAIK that's a purely state level thing, and the first law that tried that in a broad way was unanimously struck down by SCOTUS as an unconstitutional violation of the 1A. And for good reason, when you step back and remember that "crime" itself can be very broad. It wasn't that long ago that homosexual acts could still be a felony in the US. There is a strong public interest in certain criminals sharing details of what they did with journalists after the fact too. New much more limited laws have passed that I think is still up, but the ones I can think of at least are specifically about compensating victims. IIRC the mechanism is to notify and then let them sue in civil court for a longer window. I don't think any of that would apply to purely government criminal action though for somebody who has already served their sentence and paid any fines.
You might be confusing those laws with conditions attached to federal plea bargains in certain kinds of serious cases (national security stuff like terrorism). Since those are individualized "voluntary agreements" [0] specific to a given case they can include things the government couldn't do as blanket laws or even necessarily win as penalties in court at all, and I know there have been agreements that included turning over any and all profits from publishing deals to the US government. But those AFAIK are the exception, not the rule. And they wouldn't have any applicability here either.
Also, there doesn't need to be any special law for victims who have successfully sued in civil court and won a damages award to then go after whatever assets the criminal has or gets down the road to cover it. This might as a practical matter "eliminate profits": if a family of a murder victim won $10m, defendant could only pay $1m, and then the defendant gets a $7m movie deal later, court may award all of the defendant's interest to the family to help satisfy the original judgement. But again, I don't think the Japanese government has any such cause here.
----
0: scare quotes around voluntary agreements since there is a lot of reasonable debate about overuse/abuse of plea bargains by US prosecutors. But at least legally they're pretty wide open for now.
I think this would go beyond Son of Sam laws to flat out Criminal Asset Forfeiture. It is the difference between money earned from a movie/book about your crime, and being paid to perform a crime. I would expect most countries to to have laws about the latter, and that the US would cooperate in seizing the money.
Looks like some of these laws have been struck down (for violating the freedom of speech clause of the First Amendment). [1]
It seems that some of the enforcement mechanisms of surviving/new laws revolve around notifying the families of the victims when a convict receives a large sum of money, from any source. The goal is to give the family a chance to sue in civil court.
> it appears that Ghosn wants to pay them additional money (3 million dollars at least)
It sounds like it's the other way. The Taylors want Ghost to pay them $3mm, and are signaling they're willing to air out some of Ghosn's laundry in the press if he doesn't pony up.
What were they thinking? Am I supposed to feel bad?
They helped an alleged criminal to escape from his prosecution.
Then they returned to a country which basically has no incentives not to extradite them to their ally. What were they expecting?
If you're trying to frame this as civil disobedience, the path forward is jail time, to get your day in court to protest some unfairness of the law. But these were lackeys of an ultra-wealthy guy accused of securities fraud and embezzlement. The deck is stacked in Ghosn's favor, and he threw his henchfolk under the bus. He knows well enough to stay out of reach of extradition: this was not just foreseeable, it was forseen. They took money to knowingly engage in conspiracy to a crime. Womp, womp.
That is how the 99% are expected to make progress on civil rights. Difference is, he's rich af; he can afford the best representation money can buy. While Japan's "hostage justice system" is certainly unfair to the accused, he wasn't suffering that commoner-treatment, he was on house arrest in an extremely comfortable house.
The hundreds of thousands of people imprisoned for marijuana in the US have to disagree with you. Their plight did nothing towards the cause. It's only different now in some states because the public has taken a chill pill about it.
Did I say that civil disobedience is even remotely reliable? Because it's not. And, not every violation of the law is civil disobedience. For that to be the case, the violation should be done with flagrant intent to get caught for the purpose of making a political statement. The risk of doing the time, and not making any progress, is significant.
Also note the uncertainty in my opening line, "if you're trying to frame this as civil disobedience." I don't believe that this guy's alleged corruption would fit the bill.
Would you felt the same if someone helped Meng Wanzhou escape? A Chinese citizen arrested in Canada for violating US sanctions on Iran sounds very unfair to me.
