Gangster Found Innocent in Murder Case

Kyoto District Court found a defendant in a murder case of president of restaurant chain innocent on October 16th. While the defendant is a member of gangster group, the court did not find sufficient evidence that he had killed the president. The court gave the benefit to a doubt. The law enforcement could not collect enough evidence on the criminal case. Uneasiness of the people on murder was amplified with the court decision. 

The president of restaurant chain, Ousho of Gyoza, Takayuki Ohigashi was found dead in front of the headquarters building in Kyoto in the morning of December 19th, 2013. The police arrested Yukio Tanaka, who was a member of Kudo-kai, one of the designated dangerous organized crime groups in Japan and indicted in 2022. Tanaka argued that he was not the man who killed Ohigashi in the trials.

 

The public prosecutors suspected Tanaka as the hitman of an organized crime. They found two cigarette butts at the place Ohigashi was killed, from which the same type of DNA as Tanaka’s was detected. They argued that Tanaka smoked those cigarettes there and littered them. That was the main evidence of police that Tanaka was designated as the killer.

 

But the court thought that it was not sufficient as the evidence of the murder. The lawyers for Tanaka indicated that the butts had been brought by someone who tried to attributed the murder to Tanaka. The court decided that it cannot exclude a possibility that a true criminal had brought them to the place. It found that there was no proof of a crime, because the argument of public prosecutors lacked a fact that can only be explained by the true killer.

 

The public prosecutors also argued that security camera had caught the same type of motor cycle as Tanaka borrowed from his friend living close to the place. But the court could not identify those bikes as the same one. It dismissed a video footage alleged to have caught Tanaka, because it was not clear enough to identify it as Tanaka. The court did not find any motivation of Tanaka to kill Ohigashi.

 

It has been said that the court raised hurdle of proving guilty by demanding harder evidence of crime. A guilty requires a fact that cannot be explained, if the suspect is not the true criminal. That was based on a basic principle of judiciary system which gives benefit to the defendant, if the criminality has a doubt. It is likely that this stricter standard was introduced with the cases with false charge fabricated by law enforcement.

 

A third-party investigation team of Ousho found inappropriate contract between Ohigashi’s company and another specific company, in which 17 billion yen out of 26 billion yen of contract became unrecoverable. Ohigashi was in charge of settling this problem as the president. The court did not refer to the relationship between this contract and the murder.

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