Another False Investigation Appears

Kanazawa Branch of Nagoya High Court decided on October 23rd to grant retrial to a man who had been convicted of seven years in prison and served for it in a case of murder of a mid-school student girl in 1986. The court realized possibility that investigation authority had led the witnesses to false testimony for supporting the story about the case. It may make another example of fabricating crimes in the process of law enforcement. 

The girl was brutally subbed to death at her house in Fukui city in March 1986. The police arrested Shoji Maekawa through their investigation on the frequent inhalers of paint thinner in March 1987. Maekawa has been denying his commitment to the murder from the beginning of the investigation of police and public prosecutors.

 

While Fukui District Court sentenced innocent to Maekawa with lacking hard evidence of the murder by him in 1990, Kanazawa Branch of Nagoya High Court found guilty ordering seven years in prison in 1995, and the Supreme Court denied appeal of Maekawa in 1997. Maekawa served for it and left the prison in 2003.

 

Maekawa requested retrial in 2004 and Fukui District Court approved it 2011. But Nagoya High Court dismissed the decision of retrial in 2013 and the Supreme Court turned the appeal of Maekawa down in 2014. The process shows how starting retrial is difficult in judicial system in Japan. Maekawa requested retrial again with new evidences in 2022 and it was approved by Kanazawa Branch of Nagoya High Court in October 2024.

 

The reason for starting retrial was doubts on testimony of witnesses. The sentence of guilty had been based on the arguments of six acquaintances of Maekawa who saw him with blood on his clothes after the murder. One of those six was found that he/she had backed off a fact of not seeing Maekawa at the time. Another witness had told a memory that he/she was watching a TV program on the day he/she saw Maekawa. However, the day TV program was broadcast was not the day he/she saw Maekawa.

 

The court found that the witness who told about TV program had received a gift for marriage from a policeman in charge of the investigation. The court doubted that the police had been trying to achieve any preferable witness, because the investigation had been in a deadlock. It is possible that the guilty was sentenced based on false activities by the police.

 

The public prosecutors had acknowledged that contradiction on the date of TV program during the trial at Fukui District Court. However, the public prosecutors did not disclose the fact in the trial. “They had taken opportunity away from Maekawa to make right argument based on truths, by impudently continuing false argument,” Kanazawa Branch of Nagoya High Court accused the public prosecutors.

 

In the case of Iwao Hakamada, who was confirmed as innocent in a retrial earlier this month on a murder case in Shizuoka in 1966, the court found that the police and public prosecutors had fabricated evidences. Maekawa’s case can be another example of false investigation which imposed irreparable damage on a person. If the court decision was correct, it is law enforcement organizations that commits crimes.

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