A former judge is seeking to raise public awareness of how miscarriages of justice can occur, having reversed more than 20 guilty verdicts during eight years as a presiding judge at the Tokyo High Court.

In his newly published book, "Reversed on the Facts — What Overturned Guilty Verdicts Can Teach Us About Fact-Finding," Kunio Harada uses actual rulings in 16 of these cases to explain how he found misjudgments in the previous court decisions.

Harada, now a professor at Keio University law school, said he expects the book to be picked up not only by legal professionals and law students, but also by ordinary citizens who may be involved in serious criminal trials as lay judges, following a number of recent acquittals on retrial of convicts in high-profile murder cases.