On February 15, NCIP welcomed Japanese legal scholar Mari Hiryama to our office. Mari reached out to NCIP to discuss our innocence work in California for her consideration as to how our experience might inspire criminal justice reform in Japan. She shared with us information about the Japanese criminal justice system and her observations as to the difficulties faced in pursuing a claim of innocence there.
NCIP Executive Director Linda Starr and Associate Director Todd Fries with Mari Hiryama in the NCIP conference room
Mari is an Associate Professor of Criminal Procedure & Criminology at Hakuoh University in Tochigi, Japan. She received her Master of Laws from Kwansei Gakuin University Graduate School of Law. As a Fullbright scholar, Mari received an LL.M. from the University of Minnesota Law School in 2003. She was then a visiting scholar at the Center for the Study of Law and Society (CSLS). She came back to the CSLS from 2013-2014, once again as the recipient of a Fulbright Scholarship, and conducted a comparative study of criminal justice policy for sex crimes in the U.S. and Japan.
In addition to learning about our work investigating and litigating innocence cases, Mari was interested in hearing about NCIP’s work with restorative justice. In 2016, NCIP held two restorative justice retreats for individuals harmed by wrongful convictions. The retreats were designed to span two weekends, with the second retreat building off of the first.
While both retreats involved storytelling and the sharing of experiences, the retreats were developed with different goals in mind.
The goal of the first retreat was to give participants an opportunity to heal and to build a community of support. The goal of the second retreat was to continue the healing process and to provide participants with storytelling skills, using their experiences to advocate for change in the criminal justice system. Mari explained how she and her colleagues in Japan were intrigued by NCIP’s efforts and expressed her interest in learning more from others engaged in restorative justice efforts.
We learned much from Mari’s thoughtful consideration of how our experience with innocence work might inform her study in Japan and how we might also learn from the Japanese experience. We were honored to host Mari and hope that we were a helpful resource to her.
