Japan Institute for the Study
of Wrongful Arrests and Convictions

Top page---Recent News

--Okita Case: Civil Suit Against the Police ends in defeat.

Suit over groping charge dismissed
The Tokyo District Court on Monday dismissed a damages suit filed by a man who said he was arrested and detained based on a false allegation he groped a woman on the JR Chuo Line in Tokyo.

 Mitsuo Okita speaks at a news conference Monday in Hachioji, Tokyo, after his damages suit over a case of alleged groping was dismissed by the Tokyo District Court.

The court rejected the suit filed by Mitsuo Okita, of Kunitachi, western Tokyo, demanding about 10 million yen from the central government, the Tokyo Metropolitan Government and the woman, whose age was not given.
Okita was held for 21 days before a decision was made not to indict him.
"The woman's testimony of what happened has detailed information and was highly credible," said Shinichiro Matsumaru, the presiding judge.
"The plaintiff's testimony is unnatural, illogical and cannot be trusted," he said. "The arrest and detention were appropriate in light of the law."
Okita plans to appeal, his lawyers said.
According to the ruling, Okita, 63, groped the woman, who was 20 years old at the time, on the night of Sept. 2, 1999, while on his way home on the JR Chuo Line. He was arrested at the scene and was accused of groping the woman by pushing his body against her, violating a Tokyo ordinance designed to prevent such acts.
During the trial, Okita told the court that as the train was approaching JR Mitaka Station he told a female college student not to talk on her cell phone.
When he got off at Kunitachi Station, the student told police he groped her -- out of spite, Okita said.
"There is only one truth," Okita told reporters after the ruling. "The truth will eventually win."
During the trial, it was also revealed that Tokyo prosecutors mistakenly disposed of Okita's records in June 2001 because they thought the documents only had to be kept for one year instead of three. Seven prosectors were punished after the incident.

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--Man acquitted of groping wants to regain lost time

Man acquitted of groping wants to regain 2½ years lost
03/09/2006 The Asahi Shimbun

Time stopped on the morning of Oct. 22, 2003, for a family man. As he was leaving a crowded commuter train in Tokyo, a schoolgirl grabbed his hand and accused him of groping her.
On Wednesday, the Tokyo High Court exonerated the man. But the 2? years since the accusation was first lodged have taken their toll on the man and his family.
The 43-year-old in Tokyo's Nakano Ward has lost his job, income and lifestyle, and was forced to live as a person branded a chikan (groper). His constant claims of innocence were ignored by seemingly everyone except for his wife, who suffered bouts of stress during the ordeal.
Finally, the Tokyo High Court confirmed what he had saying all along. He never molested the girl and police made no efforts to thoroughly investigate the case.
The high court overturned the Tokyo District Court's conviction and suspended sentence imposed on the man.
"There is no doubt the student was the victim of a groper, but her testimony is not sufficient to convict the defendant," Presiding Judge Kunio Harada said in his ruling.
Harada also cited sloppiness in the work of the investigators, and said they might have even misled the victim into believing the man was the culprit.
"This is a case that would not have ordinarily led to an indictment," the judge said.
The man wiped away the stream of tears that flowed upon hearing the not guilty ruling.
He had been waiting for so long to hear those words.
On Oct. 22, 2003, the man was riding in a crowded train on the Seibu Shinjuku Line. As he stepped onto the platform at Takadanobaba Station, the 16-year-old senior high school student stood in his way and yelled, "You've kept touching me!"
She said he had slipped his hand inside her underwear on the train.
He denied it, but went with her to the train station office to explain there must have been a misunderstanding.
But he was taken to a police station in a squad car where detectives badgered him to "tell the truth."
He insisted he was standing behind the schoolgirl on her right side and that another man, who appeared to be a foreigner, was behind him on the left side, and that he could have been responsible.
The police didn't believe him. They held him in detention for 105 days, and he was indicted on an indecency charge.
"If police had properly investigated, things wouldn't have turned out the way they did," the man said. "Police could have tested whether there was evidence on my hand. But I was made a criminal without even doing the test."
A police officer even testified that such tests are usually done on suspected gropers to collect evidence, but the test was not conducted in the man's case.
The prosecution's case was based largely on police arguments that the other man on the train could not have reached the victim.
The Tokyo District Court found him guilty.
The man had taken a long leave of absence from a printing company he had worked for 24 years to deal with his legal problems. He has yet to return to the company.
He dug into his savings to pay for bail and cover his living expenses and legal costs. He had to sell off most of his collection of about 200 T-shirts, a hobby of his for more than 25 years.
His son, born in the sixth year of his marriage, was only 2 years old at the time. The man had kept a daily log of his son's developments, but that stopped after that train ride on the Seibu Shinjuku Line.
Desperate for money, the man started to help his father's gardening business, but he injured himself in a fall from a wall. Since then, he has relied on social welfare.
He said the only thing that kept him going was his wife, who believed in his innocence.
Immediately after the high court ruling, he called his wife with the news.
"I want to regain the time that we lost," he said.(IHT/Asahi: March 9,2006)

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Sendai Nurse Loses Appeal Case. Lawyers Boycott Courtroom.

High court upholds life term for Sendai clinic murderer
The Japan Times: Thursday, March 23, 2006

SENDAI (Kyodo) The Sendai High Court on Wednesday upheld a life sentence for a male nurse convicted of killing a patient and attempting to kill four others at a clinic in Sendai in 2000 by injecting them with muscle relaxant.

Nurse Daisuke Mori listens as the Sendai High Court upholds his life sentence for killing a patient and attempting to kill four others.
Daisuke Mori, 34, has pleaded not guilty, with his defense team claiming the patients' conditions worsened due to illness and factors other than the muscle relaxant. He immediately appealed the ruling.
His lawyers argued that the patients would have not developed the kind of symptoms they suffered even if muscle relaxant had been administered to them. They also said Mori's confession, taken immediately after his arrest, was induced by investigators.
However, presiding Judge Ryoichi Tanaka said it was difficult to believe that a situation where muscle relaxant was mistakenly administered intravenously in five cases at the same clinic within a short time was coincidental. "It is clear that someone had done this on purpose," the judge said.
The court also noted that Mori had placed orders for various types of muscle relaxant, and had also attempted to hide empty ampuls that had been used.
Based on such facts, the judge said, "Mori is the culprit in all of the cases, and there is no mistake in the lower court ruling that recognized willful intent to kill."
He also ruled that the confession could be trusted within certain boundaries.
The Sendai District Court sentenced Mori to life in March 2004, saying he had intended to kill and was the only one capable of administering the intravenous doses at the time of the crimes.
The court said he killed Yukiko Shimoyama, 89, and tried to murder four other patients, including a 1-year-old girl, at the now-defunct Hokuryo Clinic from February to November 2000.
The Japan Times: Thursday, March 23, 2006
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Man indicted 14 days before 15 year statute of limitations expires found guilty of murder.

Man handed 13 years for murder after court accepts DNA evidence
(Mainichi)
A man accused of stabbing a 56-year-old driver and leaving him to die on a road in Tokyo was sentenced to 13 years' imprisonment by the Tokyo District Court on Monday, after he was found guilty based on DNA evidence.
The man, Toshio Miki, 57 was handed the sentence after being convicted of fatally attacking 56-year-old Hideo Shirasaki in Tokyo's Adachi-ku in 1990. In addition to the 13-year sentence, he was also sentenced to 14 months' imprisonment for theft.
During the trial, Miki had claimed that he was innocent, saying that the DNA evaluation was inaccurate, but the court rejected his claims.
Miki was convicted of stabbing Shirasaki in the chest and back after getting into an argument with him in Adachi-ku on Nov. 11, 1990. He left Shirasaki in critical condition on the road, where he was hit by a car and died, according to the ruling. Blood matching Miki's DNA was found on the knife.
Commenting on the connection between Miki's actions and the death, the court said there was a clear danger of the victim dying from the stabbing after Miki let him fall on the road.
The defendant was also convicted of stealing 2,180 yen worth of liquor and other goods in Saitama Prefecture between July and September 2005.
Miki was arrested over the killing shortly before the statute of limitations on the case expired.
The case was the second in which pretrial arrangement procedures were carried out to speed up proceedings. After Miki was charged in November last year, pretrial arrangement procedures were carried out five times between December 2005 and March this year to determine the focus of the trial.
The trial was carried out over six consecutive weekdays starting on March 9, and the ruling came roughly one month after the first hearing.

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Japanese' man wrongly held eight years in Bahamas freed

Japanese' man wrongly held eight years in Bahamas freed

NASSAU, Bahamas (AP) A man suffering from amnesia but who claims to be Japanese was unlawfully held in a Bahamas prison and an immigration center for eight years without being charged, a court has ruled.
A man identified in court documents as Atain Takitota, 41, was awarded $ 500,000, which includes $ 400,000 "for the loss of eight years and two months of the appellant's (his) life," the Bahamas Court of Appeal said in a ruling that reached local news media on Friday.
Atain told officials that he arrived in the Bahamas from Osaka in August 1992 and soon lost more than $ 7,000 at a casino, then realized that his luggage, which held his passport and the rest of his money, had been stolen.
Police arrested him that night, at first suspecting that he had tried to break into a vehicle and later believing that he was a vagrant.
Authorities held Atain at two locations, including a maximum-security cell with about 20 other prisoners at the Fox Hill prison for six years.
"What is particularly troubling about this case is that not once during the entire eight-year period that the appellant was incarcerated was he taken before any court at any time," the three-judge panel said in their ruling issued Thursday.
The only reason immigration authorities gave for his detention was that he was "an undesirable and his presence was not conducive to the public good," the judges said.
Atain tried to commit suicide by going on hunger strike in 1997 and by slashing his wrists twice in 1998, but he was returned to detention after each attempt.
The judges said the medical staff at Sandilands Rehabilitation Centre in Nassau determined he was suffering from retrograde amnesia, losing memory of things before a traumatic event.
Atain has testified that he had suffered head injuries in a traffic accident about a year before he left Japan.
It's not clear if Atain forgot who he was, but the Japanese Embassy in the Dominican Republic said initial investigations in 1994 did not identify him as a Japanese citizen.
The embassy asked Bahamian authorities to contact them if there was more information, but the court said there was no evidence that officials sent any information.
Atain was released in October 2000. He filed a lawsuit that year against Bahamas' attorney general, immigration director and national security minister, alleging he was being arbitrarily held.
The Bahamas Supreme Court ruled in 2004 that Atain had entered the country illegally and awarded him $ 1,000 for his unlawful detention.
Even then, authorities appeared unsure of Atain's nationality.
Two Chinese students at a local school testified that Atain may be a Chinese national, although an officer from the Chinese Embassy in the Bahamas had said in 1998 he thought the man was "Japanese because he spoke only Japanese and a little broken English," the appeal panel said.
Phone calls on Saturday to Atain's attorney, A.D. Hanna Sr., the Bahamas governor general, were not immediately returned.
The Japan Times: March 13, 2006
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Yokohama Case: Trial is Terminated

Court terminates retrial for five tortured and convicted in wartime 'Yokohama Incident'
02/09/2006
The Asahi Shimbun YOKOHAMA--The Yokohama District Court on Thursday terminated a retrial for five now-deceased people who were arrested, tortured and convicted in the wartime "Yokohama Incident" that suppressed the media's free speech.
Presiding Judge Shoichi Matsuo decided not to determine the guilt or innocence of the five because the prewar Peace Preservation Law, on which the convictions were based, no longer exists.
The decision deals a blow to bereaved family members who have tried for years to clear the names of those convicted by the same court more than 60 years ago. They and the defense lawyers argued that the five were tortured into confessing that they planned to re-establish the Communist Party, which was outlawed at that time.
Judge Matsuo acknowledged that the defendants were tortured during the police interrogations, but he agreed with prosecutors' arguments that the retrial should be discontinued.
"It is seriously regrettable that the former defendants had passed away before appearing in the retrial because it took such a long time to reopen the case," Matsuo said.
He said the decision to stop the retrial was based not only on the defunct law, but also because original records of the trial and the rulings were discarded after the war ended.
In the Yokohama Incident, about 60 people, mainly journalists and publishers, were arrested by special police in Kanagawa Prefecture on suspicion of engaging in communist propaganda and other illegal activities from 1942 through the closing days of World War II.
They were accused of violating the Peace Preservation Law, which the government used to clamp down on communists, dissidents and other opponents of Japan's militarism.
Four of them died in prison after being tortured, and about 30 were convicted at the Yokohama District Court in August and September 1945, shortly after the war ended.
Those convicted and their bereaved family members had been trying since 1986 to clear the names of victims.
A total of four requests for a retrial had been made by former convicts and others between 1986 and 2002.
But all the people convicted in the Yokohama Incident had died by March 2003.
The Yokohama District Court in April 2003 accepted the bereaved family members' request for the retrial of five of those convicted. The Tokyo High Court in March 2005 upheld that decision, saying the credibility of the confessions was quite dubious, and the rulings in 1945 were doubtful.
During retrial sessions held in October and December last year, defense lawyers argued that the court should admit that the five had been beaten for hours with bamboo or wooden poles before falsely confessing, and that the Yokohama Incident was filled with fabrications.
The lawyers said the court should overturn the convictions, hand down not-guilty verdicts, and admit its role in what was one of the worst cases of free-speech suppression in wartime Japan.
"We want (the court) to admit its legal responsibility for handing down the guilty sentences without an adequate trial, in addition to turning down our petitions for a retrial, and to apologize," one of the bereaved family members said during the retrial.
Prosecutors asked the court to discontinue the retrial without determining guilt or innocence because the Peace Preservation Law no longer exists.(IHT/Asahi: February 9,2006)

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Osaki Case: Appeal for Retrial is Rejected.

Woman, 78, loses Supreme Court retrial bid
The Japan Times: Feb. 2, 2006
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The Supreme Court has rejected a special appeal for a retrial for a 78-year-old woman who was convicted and served time for murdering her brother-in-law in 1979, her lawyers said Wednesday.
The top court upheld a high court decision that new evidence presented in the case was not sufficient to hold a new trial, they said.
Ayako Haraguchi, who served a 10-year prison term, said Wednesday in Kagoshima that she will consult with her lawyers about Monday's decision and will continue to try to have her name cleared.
In October 1979, Kunio Nakamura, a 42-year-old farmer, was found dead in a cattle barn near his home in the town of Osaki, Kagoshima Prefecture.
Haraguchi and three others -- Nakamura's two brothers and one of his nephews -- were charged with murder. The two brothers confessed to the slaying.
The Kagoshima District Court ruled Nakamura had been strangled with a towel, and sentenced Haraguchi to 10 years and the brothers to seven years each for murder and abandoning a corpse. The nephew was given one year for abandoning a corpse.
The three men did not appeal, but Haraguchi went all the way to the Supreme Court.
Haraguchi and the nephew filed for a retrial in 1995 after serving their sentences.
Their defense team presented the court with a document that said there was a possibility the death might have been caused by Nakamura falling and breaking his neck that day.
The Japan Times: Feb. 2, 2006
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