Sunday, Oct. 14, 2007

In a retrial of a man who had been found guilty of rape, the Takaoka branch of the Toyama District Court acquitted him Wednesday. Noting that his pretrial oral statements on which investigators had based their case against him were not trustworthy, the court ruled that the man is not the perpetrator.

The police are most to blame for putting Mr. Hiroshi Yanagihara through a nearly two-year prison ordeal. They forced confessions from him so they could bring charges against him. But public prosecutors, judges and even lawyers involved also must reflect on their conduct because they failed to prevent the filing of false charges and contributed to the process that led to his wrongful imprisonment. There were occasions in which both a judge and a lawyer heard the accused deny his involvement.

Although the court eventually found the man innocent in the retrial, to both his and our great disappointment it did not try to get to the bottom of why the police arrested the man and forwarded his case to the public prosecutors office. The police and the public prosecutors office should scrutinize their investigation and make public what went wrong, including the mistakes that investigators made and the interrogation methods used.

In January 2002, a woman was raped in Himi, Toyama Prefecture. An attempted rape followed in the same city in March that year. In April, the police questioned a taxi driver, Mr. Yanagihara, then 40. At first he denied his involvement, but on the third day of the interrogation, he reversed his statement and was arrested. The Takaoka branch of the Toyama District Public Prosecutors Office indicted him on charges of rape, trespassing and attempted rape. Before prosecutors, the man again stated that he had not committed the crimes and, again, later reversed his statement.

Throughout the original trial, the defendant accepted the facts related to the crimes presented by the prosecution. The Takaoka branch of the Toyama District Court found him guilty and sentenced him to three years' imprisonment in November 2002. After spending about two years in the Fukui Prison, he was released on parole in January 2005.

But a 52-year-old man who was arrested by Tottori prefectural police in August 2006 in connection with an indecent sexual assault confessed to the Toyama rape cases in November that year. The police search for corroborative evidence on the basis of this man's confessions showed that he was very likely the real culprit in the Toyama cases. To establish Mr. Yanagihara's innocence, the public prosecutors office called for a retrial. At the retrial, which started last June, the office presented a telephone conversation record proving the taxi driver's alibi as well as records of the second man's oral statements after he was arrested by the Tottori prefectural police.

In acquitting the taxi driver, Wednesday's ruling said the confessions by the second man are trustworthy because he took police investigators to the scene of rape. It also said footprints of his sneakers left at the Tottori scene are essentially identical to those left at the scenes of the sexual assaults in Himi.

It is likely that the police were initially misled by the fact that the rape victims chose Mr. Yanagihara as the perpetrator when presented with photographs of possible suspects. The Toyama prefectural police then tried to get confessions from him that fit their crime scenario. Although the man denied his involvement, investigators persistently pressed him to confess to the crimes. According to him, he was forced to hold a photograph of his dead mother while being interrogated. A police officer also grabbed his right wrist to make him draw a map of the crime scenes.

Under the assumption that Mr. Yanagihara was the culprit, the police made the deplorable mistake of ignoring material evidence. They ignored the fact that the 28-cm footprints left at the scenes in Himi were larger than his 24.5-cm foot size. They also ignored the telephone conversation record showing that he phoned his elder brother's home from his home at the time the rape was committed. Although the victims said the criminal used a "survival" knife, the police presented a fruit knife found at the taxi driver's home as evidence. Prosecutors also failed to pay enough attention to the changes in his confessions.

To show that the defendant was forced to make false confessions, the defense counsel asked the court twice to summon police investigators to the retrial. But the court rejected the requests. It is unpardonable that the court thus destroyed any chance of examining what the police actually did during the interrogation and investigation. Prosecutors did not make any effort to clarify how and why the taxi driver was falsely charged. The Toyama case points to the need to audio- and video-record the entire interrogation process and to ensure the presence of a lawyer during interrogation.

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