A man was jailed for murder. 15 years after his death, he will get a retrial
By Yumi Asada, Chris Lau, CNN
Tokyo (CNN) — When a Japanese court granted Hiromu Sakahara a retrial, there was no defendant in the dock celebrating the prospect of freedom.
Instead, family members gathered around his grave to share news that he had longed to hear in life after a decades-long fight for justice.
Sakahara died in 2011 while serving a life sentence for murdering a store manager in the rural town of Hino in 1984 – based on a confession that he said was forced.
A rare posthumous retrial is expected to begin soon, but the long delays in Sakahara’s case added momentum to calls for reform to speed up the excruciatingly long process people must go through to seek redress in Japan.
“I regret that we could not save my father from prison,” his son Koji Sakahara told CNN.
“While I am happy about the decision to grant a retrial, it’s still incredibly painful,” said Koji, now 64 with hair that’s turned grey during the long campaign to prove his father’s innocence.
Japan has a reputation for “hostage justice,” a term used to describe the detention of suspects for questioning, often without access to legal counsel, for far longer than the law allows in other countries.
With a conviction rate of over 99%, human rights groups say innocent people are being jailed for crimes they didn’t commit.
Sakahara first filed for a retrial in 2001. Even after his death a decade later, his family kept pushing for a new hearing, which was repeatedly challenged by prosecutors in all three levels of court.
Sakahara’s long wait for justice inspired a new bill that, if passed, could make it harder for prosecutors to appeal decisions granting a retrial.
Officials within Japan’s Justice Department argue that the proposed changes could undermine the finality of convictions.
However, Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi – a right-winger who counts Britain’s Margaret Thatcher among her political idols – has backed the legislation, telling parliament last month that it’s vital to ensuring the retrial system delivers prompt justice.
“It is unacceptable for innocent people to be punished,” she said. “If a final judgment convicts an innocent person, that person must be promptly exonerated.”
A quiet life upended
Koji Sakahara says in the early 80s his family was living an ordinary life in Hino, a quiet town about an hour’s drive east of Kyoto.
“Everyone in our family was working; we had no financial struggles, and I believe we were having a happy life with our father, who was very devoted to his children,” he said.
But their world turned upside down in December 1984 after the disappearance of a local liquor store manager in a suspected murder-robbery. Her body was found a month later in a field.
Sakahara was initially called in by police for questioning because he was a frequent customer to the store. However, he was released shortly after his wife was able to prove that he was drinking somewhere else on the night, according to Koji.
But police returned three years later to question him, and after a day of interrogation, he confessed to the crime.
Sakahara later told his son he’d been beaten and kicked and only buckled after officers began to direct the threats at people around him, said Koji, who had confronted his father about his confession.
The next day, police took Sakahara away. “He never came home again,” Koji recalled. Sakahara argued his innocence during his trial but was convicted based on police claims that he was able to lead them to the location of the body, and separately the site of the safe that was stolen from the liquor store.
Throughout the 24 years Sakahara was locked up, his son and other family members would visit him and tell him to hang on, as they fought to get his case reheard. “You can’t give up in a place like this,” they would tell him.
But his father contracted pneumonia in 2011, and after two decades in prison, his body was too weak to fight it.
Sakahara passed away that year. “You don’t have to fight anymore. It’s okay to let go. You’ve worked so hard until now,” his sister told their father moments before his heart stopped beating, Koji recalled.
All these years, the stigma stuck no matter how hard the family fought to change the narrative. “People viewed us as a family of a criminal,” said Koji, adding that his mother used to get harassing calls, heckling “murderer.”
The family won a retrial based on negative film stored within evidence files that their lawyer argued shows that police may have guided Sakahara to the location of the body.
Sakahara is believed to be only the second person granted a posthumous trial in post-war Japan.
The first was in 1985, when six years after her death, Shigeko Fuji was acquitted of killing her husband. She spent 27 years in prison for the crime that evidence ultimately suggested was committed by an intruder.
Two years ago, another man, Iwao Hakamata, was acquitted after spending more than 46 years on death row for a murder his lawyer said he was forced to admit.
Overdue reforms
Part of the problem in Japan is the lack of legal representation for those brought in for questioning over an alleged crime.
Japan hasn’t made access to lawyers during interrogations an absolute right despite being a member of The Group of Seven (G7) – an intergovernmental forum of the US and other Western allies that often emphasizes the importance of human rights and the rule of law. These failures have long drawn criticism from the United Nations Human Rights Committee.
Japan’s legal system has also been criticized for handing prosecutors too much power. Under the proposed change, they’ll only be able to appeal a retrial decision if there are “sufficient grounds.”
The country’s Justice Ministry had opposed the changes, claiming that limiting the scope for appeals could “undermine the institutional safeguards that ensure careful and fair judicial decisions.”
There is also “a significant risk that this would fundamentally alter the nature of interrogations – which play a crucial role in evidence gathering – and substantially undermine their effectiveness,” the spokesperson added.
Some criminal law experts, however, said the reform has been long overdue.
Law professor Tomonobu Ishida, at Meiji University in Tokyo, said delays for wrongly convicted individuals to seek justice are “one of the most serious problems in Japan’s criminal justice system.”
“In some retrial cases, it has taken decades before wrongful convictions were corrected. During that time, defendants and their families often suffer irreparable physical, psychological, and social harm,” he said.
Professor Koji Tabuchi, who specializes criminal law in Kyushu University in Fukuoka, said it’s time for prosecutors to forgo a zero-sum mindset when an individual’s liberty is on the line.
“When judges declare a defendant not guilty in Japan, prosecutors think: ‘We lost’,” he said. “But do they have to think so?”
Those waiting for justice in jail also aren’t getting any younger, said another expert in Japanese criminal law.
“Many of the defendants for petitioning for the retrial, they’re very old and they actually have no time left,” said Kana Sasakura, law professor at Konan University in the western city of Kobe.
Sakahara’s lawyer Ryota Ishigawa, who had been fighting his case for 20 years, says the decision to grant a retrial came too late.
“As the defense team, we are deeply disappointed. There is fundamental injustice in the system as a whole. We’re frustrated that we couldn’t celebrate with the defendant,” he said.
For Koji, change can’t come soon enough — the years of fighting for justice for his father have burdened him with guilt and regret.
“If the retrial had been granted while he was alive, he would still be here,” he said, of his father.
“I sincerely hope that Japan will, as soon as possible, bring its legal system in line with other countries, so that no more victims of wrongful convictions have to suffer.”
The-CNN-Wire
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