EDITORIAL: Ashikaga Incident retrial

Why did Toshikazu Sugaya "confess" to a crime he did not commit? How did investigators get him to make the false confession? Why did the judges fail to notice the mistake?

The retrial of the 1990 Ashikaga Incident that started Wednesday at the Utsunomiya District Court must clearly reveal the answers to these questions before the public.

Anyone could find himself or herself in the same position as Sugaya. Or they could become citizen judges and falsely convict an innocent person. That is why those questions must be answered.

Before the Ashikaga Incident, in which a 4-year-old girl was murdered 19 years ago in Ashikaga, Tochigi Prefecture, young girls were murdered in surrounding areas. None of the cases had been solved.

For around 18 months, police also had no strong leads in the Ashikaga case, and investigators were getting impatient.

But police then received the results of tests conducted by the National Policy Agency's National Research Institute of Police Science. The results found a match between the DNA patterns of bodily fluids found on the victim's clothing and those of Sugaya, whom police were keeping an eye on.

At the time, DNA tests had just been introduced and their accuracy was low. Despite the unreliability of the tests, both police and prosecutors portrayed the test results as definitive proof to drive Sugaya to "confess." He was then arrested and indicted.

When Sugaya later tried to tell the truth, prosecutors once again strongly forced him to "confess," according to his lawyers, citing tape recordings of his interrogation.

Sugaya continued to admit to the crime in court until half way through the first trial.

But Sugaya's "confession" did not reveal any details of the crime that only the real culprit would know. In fact, some points in his statements contradicted the actual circumstances of the crime scene.

The act of placing too much confidence in the results of expert tests and evaluations has often led to wrongful convictions. Why didn't the court question the DNA test results and have neutral organizations conduct new tests?

It was also possible that the test results themselves were wrong. In effect, police and prosecutors used the false confession in the Ashikaga Incident to make the DNA test results appear more legitimate.

In Sugaya's retrial, the court decided to call experts as witnesses to re-examine the DNA tests by the National Research Institute of Police Science that became the grounds for Sugaya's life sentence. The court also ordered the prosecution to submit tape recordings of the interrogation process.

The court should also summon investigators in the Ashikaga Incident to testify and clarify the process of DNA testing and how Sugaya "confessed." The tapes also need to be played in court.

Not only the prosecution, but also the courts, even the Supreme Court, made a serious mistake. And the defense was inadequate in some regards.

Unless the cause of Sugaya's wrongful conviction is made clear and measures are taken to prevent similar mistakes, the judiciary cannot recover public trust.

Sugaya was released after spending 17 and a half years behind bars for a crime he did not commit. At his retrial, he said, "Please clarify the truth and deliver a not-guilty ruling that I find convincing."

Will we never learn from the history of false accusations? Can the court provide answers on how to rectify flaws in the criminal justice system? That is what this retrial is about.

--The Asahi Shimbun, Oct. 23(IHT/Asahi: October 24,2009)