On January 22, 2007, while I was working at Big Y’s Café, police officers came from the Kagacho Police Station and arrested me for raping a Japanese woman on the morning of November 1, 2006, according to the complainant ’s accusation that she was raped when heavily drunk. I have nothing to do with the accusation. They arrested me without any material evidence, solely based on the complainant’s statements revised a number of times and conflicting with each other. I believe that a female friend of the complainant used the complainant to damage me in court. That friend of the complainant was among my customers. She had caused a trouble in my bar before the accusation. The police helped them by destroying evidence in my favor and eventually prosecuted me. The complainant’s statement that she had been drunk too much to move contradicts the facts.

On December 10, 2007, the Yokohama District Court declared me guilty with a sentence of three years in prison. However, I am innocent. I did not commit this crime. I am not a rapist or a criminal. I am completely innocent. Thus I filed an appeal immediately.

My attorney at law submitted a reason-for-appeal statement on February 25, 2008. To the statement, I would like to add the following.

I was coerced to sign deposition documents prepared by the police who promised me that they would not prosecute me if I would sign. Furthermore, the police intentionally hid or lost critical evidence. For example, they erased the phone number of the complainant’s friend from my cell phone address book as well as the record of threatening e-mail messages from the same person. Also, because of their failure to investigate the surveillance tape of the camera in my bar, subsequent data overwrote the tape automatically and erased the record for the day in question. The police never documented detailed description of the relationship between the complainant and her friend, effectively hiding the intent of the accusation.