Suggestion for Attorney dedicated to Citizen Participation Criminal Trials

In citizen participation criminal trials, ordinary citizens participate directly in the verdict. Accordingly, procedural adequacy is more strongly required than in ordinary trials. Therefore, state-appointed attorneys appointed in citizen participation criminal trials shall have sufficient competence to perform the aforementioned tasks. However, since citizen participation criminal trials are compulsory representation cases, a state-appointed attorney is assigned to a defendant without an attorney. But it is not certain that the state-appointed attorney arbitrarily designated by the court will be able to proceed smoothly in citizen participation criminal trials with the following reasons. First of all, it is difficult for a defendant to determine whether the state-appointed attorney to conduct such trial has the minimum ability even though the defendant is the party who applied for citizen participation criminal trials. Additionally, there is no special benefit even if a state-appointed attorney diligently carries out the case, and the cases and defense techniques of citizen participation criminal trials are held only by individual attorneys so that it is difficult to improve the quality of defense in citizen participation criminal trials over time. The current state-appointed counsel system that courts assign cases to attorneys, has its limitations in allowing high-quality attorneys to take charge of citizen participation criminal trials. This is because it is difficult for a state-appointed attorney to be fundamentally independent from the court. Even if these limitations are acknowledged to some extent, there is a great need for the state-appointed attorney to be completely independent of the court in citizen participation criminal trials in which juries participate. Therefore, this paper proposes establishment of a dedicated attorney system that conducts only citizen participation criminal trials. Attorneys dedicated to citizen participation criminal trials should belong to a separate organization independent of the courts, and at the very least, they should hold higher job security than the current state-appointed attorneys. In terms of jurisdiction area, it would be reasonable to allow attorneys in charge of citizen participation criminal trials to take nationwide jurisdiction. Other remuneration, treatment, workload, etc. are recommended to be determined by referring to the example of the dedicated state-appointed attorney, but to complement the reverse incentives of the existing state-appointed counsel system, it would be necessary to provide additional benefits to excellent attorneys.