High court decides to retry 1990 murder case to acquit Sugaya+

TOKYO, June 23 Kyodo -
The Tokyo High Court decided Tuesday to open a retrial of a 62-year-old man,
who was convicted and imprisoned for more than 17 years over a 1990 murder
case, after a fresh DNA test effectively proved his innocence.

The retrial will be held at the Utsunomiya District Court, which should acquit
Toshikazu Sugaya by the year's end as prosecutors are unlikely to argue he
should be found guilty of killing a 4-year-old girl in Ashikaga, Tochigi
Prefecture.
The focus of the retrial will be on whether it can be clarified how he was
wrongfully convicted when investigative authorities depended on less-accurate
DNA tests of those days and he was forced to make false confessions during
interrogations. The justice system is also in focus as ordinary citizens will
join criminal courts as lay judges as early as August.
The latest DNA test results indicate Sugaya's DNA did not match traces found on
the murdered girl's clothes, and the high court considered them ''new evidence
to issue a not-guilty verdict.''
The results ''are sufficient enough to question the credibility of (Sugaya's)
confessions,'' the high court determined. ''It is now reasonably doubtful to
recognize Mr. Sugaya as the culprit.''
A launch of retrial over a case in which life imprisonment or the death penalty
is finalized is the first since 1986, when the Shizuoka District Court reopened
a case on a death row inmate who was eventually acquitted.
The high court, however, rejected the demand of Sugaya's defense lawyers that
11 people, including the National Police Agency's crime laboratory officials
who conducted the DNA test during the investigation, be questioned as witnesses
''in order to dig out the truth over the false accusation.''
The investigative authorities have already admitted to their erroneous arrest
and indictment of Sugaya, and a senior prosecutor as well as heads of the
National Police Agency and the Tochigi prefectural police have expressed their
regrets or apologies to him either directly or indirectly after he was released
from Chiba Prison in Chiba Prefecture on June 4.
The Tochigi prefectural police arrested Sugaya on suspicion of murder based on
DNA test results in December 1991.
He once admitted to the allegation but retracted his confession later, saying
it was forced on him by the police, but the Utsunomiya District Court sentenced
him to life in prison as sought by prosecutors in July 1993. The sentence was
finalized by the Supreme Court in July 2000.
The Tokyo High Court, which had been handling Sugaya's petition for a retrial,
in December 2008 ordered a new DNA test conducted on him and on May 8, 2009, it
notified the prosecutors and defense counsel that the test results indicated he
was most likely not the culprit in the case.
Sugaya, a former kindergarten school bus driver, was offered a city-run
residence and a job as a school bus driver for a city-run elementary school by
the Ashikaga mayor when the two met last week.
The accuracy of DNA testing has greatly improved since it began to be used in
criminal investigations in Japan in 1989, immediately before the murder, with
an expert saying procedures used during the investigation in the case were
still at the early stages of development.
==Kyodo