Justice Bernard found the proceedings so unfair and technically flawed that he deemed it impossible to pass any judgment whatever. He deplored the “abominable crimes” committed by the Japanese and acknowledged that at least some of the defendants bore heavy responsibility for those transgressions. The absence of the emperor, however, struck him as so glaring an inequity that condemning the defendants was impossible. Japan’s crimes against peace “had a principal author who escaped all prosecution and of whom in any case the present Defendants could only be considered as accomplices.” Measuring
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