Japan’s Top Court to Decide Whether to Reopen 1966 Murder Case

June 19, 2018

Tokyo- A group of lawyers filed a special appeal to the Supreme Court on Monday over a recent high court judgment overriding a lower court decision to reopen a high-profile 1966 murder case in Shizuoka Prefecture, central Japan.

The Japanese top court is thus set to decide whether to grant a retrial to Iwao Hakamada, 82, who was released from prison in 2014, about 48 years after his arrest and more than 30 years after his death sentence was finalized, based on the decision by Shizuoka District Court to reopen the case, suspend the sentence and free him.

The district court decision was overturned by Tokyo High Court last week.

At a press conference in Tokyo on Monday, Katsuhiko Nishijima, who heads the lawyers' group, said that the high court judgment ignored the principle of law and deviated from the iron rule of "when in doubt, for the accused" in criminal trial.

In the June 1966 incident, a house in the city of Shimizu, now part of the city of Shizuoka, was set on fire and the murdered bodies of four members of the family were found inside. Hakamada was arrested in August the same year for murder and robbery. Shizuoka District Court sentenced him to death in September 1968, and the sentence was finalized by the Supreme Court in November 1980.

The 2014 Shizuoka court decision to reopen the case was based on the result of an analysis that the DNA found in blood traces left on a shirt that was recognized by the finalized sentence to have been worn at the time of the murder did not match the DNA of Hakamada, a former professional boxer.

Tokyo High Court dismissed the judgment on June 11 this year, saying that the method used in the DNA analysis cannot be recognized as established science and that serious doubt exists on the effectiveness of the method.

Still, the high court allowed Hakamada to remain free and stopped short of canceling the suspension of his death sentence, taking his age and health condition into consideration. Jiji Press