Retrial of 1967 murder-robbery case begins, 2 plead not guilty+

TOKYO, July 9 Kyodo -
Two men convicted in a 1967 murder-robbery case in Ibaraki Prefecture pleaded
not guilty as their retrial began Friday at the Mito District Court's Tsuchiura
Branch, following a Supreme Court decision ordering the retrial last December.
Shoji Sakurai and Takao Sugiyama, both 63, who had been serving life
imprisonment but have since been freed on parole, are likely to be acquitted
given that the top court has denied the credibility of their confessions in its
decision to order the retrial.
''We are innocent. We did not commit the crime,'' Sakurai said in Friday's
session. ''The bulk of blame for the fact that we were wrongfully convicted and
are still called defendants should be placed on the prosecutors who concealed
evidence.''
Sugiyama said he was also a victim who was forced to make false confessions
during the course of investigations.
''It's too late for regrets, but I still can't stop regretting after all the 43
years letting myself be forced to make false confessions,'' Sugiyama said in a
written statement.
Defense lawyers for them argued that their innocence should be proven as soon
as possible and that the reason they were falsely charged will have to be
clarified.
It is the seventh time a retrial has been ordered for a postwar criminal case
in which defendants faced finalized death penalties or life imprisonment,
according to the Supreme Court.
In what is commonly referred to as the ''Fukawa Case,'' after the name of the
area where the crime took place, 62-year-old carpenter Shoten Tamamura was
killed and robbed of 107,000 yen in the town of Tone in August 1967.
The district court sentenced Sakurai and Sugiyama to life in prison in 1970.
Their convictions were finalized by the Supreme Court in 1978, and they were
released from prison on parole in 1996.
In the Fukawa case, the credibility of the two men's confessions during an
investigation and of eyewitness testimony was called into question due to a
lack of physical evidence.
In petitioning for a retrial, the defense counsel for Sakurai and Sugiyama
submitted ''new evidence,'' including test results showing that the victim was
most likely to have been strangled with underwear, not by hand as the men had
confessed during their questioning.
In the retrial, prosecutors are expected to request a DNA analysis of the shirt
found wrapped around the victim to prove the men's guilt. Their defense opposes
such an analysis and has called for their swift acquittal, arguing that the
evidence may have been contaminated, for example, with saliva from the two or
the investigators who questioned them.
Following the men's second petition for a retrial, the district court decided
to reopen the case in 2005, saying the accounts given by the two men were
inconsistent with evidence from the body of Tamamura.
The Tokyo High Court supported the decision in 2008, and the Supreme Court
rejected prosecutors' appeal on Dec. 14, 2009, opening the way for the retrial.
==Kyodo
2010-07-10 00:38:13


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