Message4800

I think I read about a similar problem before but could not find
anything in particular (sorry if this is a known behaviour), but:

Jython (2.5rc3)
>>> '\xe4'.decode('utf-8')
u''

Python 
>>> '\xe4'.decode('utf-8')
...
UnicodeDecodeError: 'utf8' codec can't decode byte 0xe4 in position 0:
unexpected end of data

The same for example for '1'.decode('utf-16') which does raise in Python
but simple returns u'' in Jython.

Is there any way this might change or work around this incompatibility?
I have problems running all my tests. 

Thanks a lot!