On Friday the Utsunomiya District Court in Japan put an end to the long and drawn-out Ashikaga murder case. As the presiding judge announced the not-guilty verdict, he bowed deeply to the accused and apologized — an apology the man had been waiting to hear for 17-and-a-half years.
On May 12, 1990, a little girl was reported missing in the Japanese city of Ashikaga. The next morning her dead body was found on the banks of the nearby Watarase River. Pubic hairs and semen stains were found on the victim’s clothes. With no witnesses to the crime, the police focused their investigation on 43-year-old Toshikazu Sugaya, a driver employed by the dead girl’s kindergarten, and collected his DNA for testing.
At the time, DNA matching techniques were still in their infancy and Japan’s grasp of the new science lagged behind that of Britain, where it originated. In its forensic appraisal report, Japan’s National Research Institute of Police Science identified the accused as being the perpetrator, but it also appended a note that the test result was not reliable.
Despite having only this report to go on, the police were still determined to pursue their investigation against Sugaya. A year and a half after the incident, the police, seeking to avoid interference from a defense lawyer, forcibly took the accused man to the police station, where they submitted him to an intense and exhausting interrogation. Police officers repeatedly threatened Sugaya, telling him they had already obtained sufficient evidence and that if he didn’t confess he was sure to receive the death penalty.
Overcome with helplessness and fear, Sugaya confessed. Even before he did so, the police had told the media what they wanted to hear by announcing that they had solved the case. From that moment the defendant lost his freedom, and the verdict against him was given added weight when the Supreme Court rejected Sugaya’s appeal on July 17, 2000. Although not condemned to die, he was now fated to spend years fighting the judicial system.
Despite the apparent finality of the verdict, Japanese lawyers continued to campaign on the issue and finally in June last year, the Tokyo High Court ordered a retrial. The critical factor behind that decision was that DNA-matching technology had now advanced sufficiently to disprove the original test result.
“Evidence” that had been taken as solid proof of guilt at the time of the original trial was now re-examined. For example, the fact that the 43-year-old defendant was unmarried and lived alone had been accepted as evidence of alleged pedophilic tendencies. In hindsight, such an assertion seems both ridiculous and tragic.
Let us recall how, in 1978, three employees of Taiwan’s First Bank were charged by prosecutors with corruption as a result of certain payment irregularities. After being tried and then retried for three decades, the case was finally concluded with a not-guilty verdict.
Nonetheless, two of those accused were denied compensation for unjust imprisonment on the grounds that they had “misled” the prosecution while in detention. They then applied for a constitutional interpretation from the Justices of the Constitutional Court, who ultimately saw justice done by overturning the Judicial Yuan’s decision. Is it acceptable for prosecutors to abuse their powers of detention and indictment and for judges to deliver hasty verdicts? No prosecutors or judges have been punished or asked to pay compensation for their involvement in this miscarriage of justice, nor have they ever admitted to being wrong.
It is my belief that Taiwan’s judiciary owes the public an apology.
Wu Ching-chin is an assistant professor in the Department of Financial and Economic Law at Alethia University.
TRANSLATED BY JULIAN CLEGG
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