Ex-Nissan CEO Carlos Ghosn excoriated the Japanese legal system this week during a two-hour press conference defending his decision to flee the country as he awaited trial for financial crimes tied to the Japanese automaker.

“I did not escape justice. I fled injustice and persecution, political persecution,” Ghosn said at a press conference in Beirut, Lebanon on Wednesday. “You're going to die in Japan or you've got to get out.”

The condemnation from Ghosn, once dubbed “an auto industry superhero,” opens up Japan’s legal system to increased scrutiny ahead of the Summer Olympics in Tokyo. It’s a system whose prosecutors secure convictions over 99% of the time. It’s one that allows a trial by a jury of one’s peers only for certain crimes. And it’s one that, according to Ghosn, interrogated him without the presence of his lawyers and denied him the right to a quick trial on trumped-up charges.

“This whole incident has taken a criminal justice system that I think has often been shielded from the view of the world and it’s brought it front and center,” says Matthew Wilson, president of Missouri Western State University, who’s a lawyer with extensive experience working in Japan.

‘Pretty much everybody gets convicted’

Ghosn — a 65-year-old Brazilian-born French and Lebanese citizen — asserted that he’d been deprived of freedom since his arrest in November 2018 for allegedly under-reporting his compensation in public filings. He was detained for more than 100 days before his release on $8.9 million bail in March and his cinematic escape late last month.

View photos Former Nissan chairman Carlos Ghosn gestures as he speaks during a news conference at the Lebanese Press Syndicate in Beirut, Lebanon January 8, 2020. REUTERS/Mohamed Azakir More

In his press conference on Wednesday, Ghosn suggested that he fled to Lebanon because his conviction in Japan was a foregone conclusion. He’s not necessarily being paranoid. As has been widely reported, Japan has over a 99% criminal conviction rate.

“Pretty much everybody prosecuted gets convicted,” says J. Mark Ramseyer, a professor of Japanese legal studies at Harvard Law School and a noted authority on Japanese law. Still, he noted, “The Japanese system, it’s basically a fair one.”

While the 99% conviction rate might suggest a rigged system, experts on Japanese law are quick to point out that prosecutors there are extremely selective about which cases they take on.

“There’s surprisingly few prosecutors in Japan and so they’re overworked,” Ramseyer told Yahoo Finance, noting that they therefore focus on the “slam dunk” cases.

‘Two extremes in executive compensation’

The case against Ghosn began in November 2018, when he was arrested on his corporate jet after it landed at a Tokyo airport and accused of failing to report millions of dollars in compensation. A 2010 Japanese law requires companies to disclose top executive pay, a kind of “social sanction” meant to embarrass companies that overpay their chiefs, according to Bruce Aronson, an affiliated scholar at the U.S.-Asia Law Institute at the NYU School of Law.

“The U.S. and Japan are two extremes in executive compensation,” Aronson said, explaining that outsize CEO compensation is not as socially acceptable in Japan as it is in the U.S.

Still, it would have been “bizarre” to haul Ghosn to jail simply for failing to report part of his compensation, according to Ramseyer, the Harvard Law School professor.

View photos Former Nissan Motor Chariman Carlos Ghosn leaves the Tokyo Detention House in Tokyo, Japan April 25, 2019. REUTERS/Issei Kato TPX IMAGES OF THE DAY More

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