EDITORIAL: Ashikaga case retrial

In trying to elicit a confession by using the results of a DNA test, a prosecutor said to a murder suspect: "You are being sneaky, aren't you? ... Why don't you look me in the eye while speaking?"

"I'm sorry, please forgive me," the suspect eventually said in tears. He withdrew his denial of the suspicions and made a fresh confession to the crime.

These are part of a prosecutor's questioning of Toshikazu Sugaya, who was given a life sentence over the 1990 murder of a 4-year-old girl in Ashikaga, Tochigi Prefecture.

Tape recordings of the interrogation were played on Thursday during Sugaya's retrial at the Utsunomiya District Court. After spending more than 17 years behind bars, Sugaya was released in June last year after new DNA tests proved his innocence.

The recordings show how a confession was extracted from Sugaya, now 63, not under torture, but under strong psychological pressure.

After his claim of innocence was dismissed again and again, Sugaya buckled under pressure and acted as if he had actually committed the crime.

Psychologists say this is a typical pattern of a suspect being pressured into confessing to a crime he has not committed.

It is horrifying to imagine being in Sugaya's shoes at the time.

There were inconsistencies between Sugaya's false confession and facts obtained at the crime scene. The recordings indicate that the prosecutor himself felt there was something off about Sugaya's confession.

Nevertheless, the prosecutor made Sugaya falsely confess for a second time. A DNA test at that time that was not highly reliable showed Sugaya's DNA pattern matched that of body fluid left on the victim's clothes. The fresh DNA analysis, however, has disproved the old test results.

It seems that investigators were so focused on obtaining a confession of guilt from the suspect that they failed to pay adequate attention to facts that contradicted their scenario. As a result, they not only caused a person to suffer under a false charge but also failed to capture the real criminal.

The prosecutor who interrogated Sugaya appeared in the courtroom Friday as a witness and said he took the fact that Sugaya didn't commit the crime "very seriously." But the former prosecutor did not offer an apology as demanded by the wrongfully convicted man.

However, the blame for the tragedy should not be placed solely on the former prosecutor. Serious flaws with the way criminal investigations were conducted at that time led to the false conviction and the botched probe.

Police and prosecutors should break with their traditional focus on obtaining confessions and commit themselves to the basic principle of criminal investigations, which demands accumulating enough solid evidence to prove the suspect's guilt.

A good start would be to make video and audio recordings of interrogations to break the secrecy.

Some lawmakers of the ruling Democratic Party of Japan, which has pledged to mandate full recordings of interrogations, are lobbying for an early enactment of new legislation for the step.

It would be grossly wrong, however, for them to use the legislation to put pressure on prosecutors investigating the political fund scandal involving DPJ Secretary-General Ichiro Ozawa.

Law-enforcement authorities have taken steps to partially record their interrogations. But they oppose the proposal to subject the entire interrogation process to the requirement of recordings, claiming that would make it harder for them to dig out the whole truth.

Unless the mind-set of investigators and the system under which they work are both changed, public confidence in criminal investigations and trials will wane. That could undermine the very foundation of public security in Japan.

The disastrous failure of the investigation into the Ashikaga murder case is so serious that it raises such concerns.

--The Asahi Shimbun, Jan. 23