"A man and woman
serving life in prison for starting a fire that killed the woman’s
11-year-old daughter were freed Monday when the Osaka High Court ordered
their release following a decision to reopen the arson-murder case.
At around 2 p.m., Keiko Aoki, 51, walked out of a prison in
Wakayama Prefecture while Tatsuhiro Boku, 49, was released from a prison
in Oita Prefecture. They had been behind bars for two decades. Prosecutors had sought to prevent their release.........Last Friday, the Osaka High Court endorsed a March 2012 lower court
decision to grant a retrial to Aoki, the mother of the 11-year-old
victim, and Boku, her de facto husband. Both were serving life terms
after being found guilty of setting their house on fire in a bid to kill
the girl and collect on the life insurance. They pleaded not guilty during their initial trial, even though at
one point during questioning by police and prosecutors they had admitted
to the allegations. In Friday’s decision, Judge Masaaki Yoneyama said there is a high
possibility that the two are not guilty and that it would be “unjust to
further detain them 20 years after their arrest.” The couple were arrested in September 1995 on murder charges, and
their conviction was finalized by the Supreme Court in late 2006. The Osaka District Court decided in 2012 to reopen the case after the two requested a retrial in 2009. Upholding the lower court decision, the Osaka High Court concluded
Friday that the fire could have been accidental and that Boku’s arson
confession had lost credibility. The pair’s lawyers conducted an experiment to simulate the fire and
claimed it was accidentally caused by a bathtub water heater and
gasoline leaking from a car in their garage. After lodging an objection to the district court decision on the
retrial, prosecutors conducted their own experiment but failed to
reverse the defense claim. Experts say the ruling follows a trend where courts focus more on
evidence with a scientific basis than on suspects’ confessions."
http://wrongfulconvictionsblog.org/2015/10/26/more-on-higashi-sumiyoshi-arson-case/SeeDaily Mail on line report: "Defence lawyers had argued that subsequent tests suggested the fire was likely not arson, and there were questions about whether the boyfriend was forced into a false confession during his interrogation. Prosecutors had also failed in their attempts to re-create the fire with key details from his original confession, reports said. Their release comes after Iwao Hakamada -- believed to be the world's longest-serving death row inmate -- walked free from jail last year after decades in solitary confinement, in a rare about-face for Japan's rigid justice system. He had been accused of being responsible for the grisly 1966 murder of his boss and the man's family, but doubts arose about the reliability of his confession. Confessions are common in Japanese criminal cases and typically seal the fate of almost all those charged with crimes. Masaru Okunishi, who had spent decades seeking a retrial while sitting on death row, passed away this month at the age of 89. He had been convicted of multiple counts of murder for slipping pesticides into wine at a community party in a remote mountain village in the early sixties."
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/wires/afp/article-3289678/Japan-couple-freed-20-years-doubt-murder-guilt.html
