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GIST: "Public prosecutors in Japan are conducting a supplementary investigation ahead of the retrial of Iwao Hakamada, who spent decades on death row over a 1966 murder before being released, sources close to the case have told the Mainichi Shimbun, raising the possibility they could attempt to prove his guilt.
Prosecutors handling the case, which led to Hakamada's conviction over the murder of four members of a family in Shizuoka Prefecture in June 1966, are said to be seeking expert opinion on the change in the coloration of bloodstains on five articles of clothing that Hakamada was said to have been wearing at the time, which was the focus of the retrial request hearing.
In a decision by the Tokyo High Court in March, which granted Hakamada a retrial, the credibility of prosecutors' own experiment on the changes in color of bloodstains was denied and they gave up on filing a special appeal with the Supreme Court.
The Shizuoka District Court has requested that public prosecutors indicate by July 10 whether they plan to attempt to prove Hakamada's guilt at the retrial there, but if they try to do so using the same items, it is likely to spark a backlash from Hakamada's defense team with criticism that prosecutors are trying to rehash their argument.
During Hakamada's trial in the Shizuoka District Court one year and two months after the murders, five articles of clothing were found in a tank at a miso factory where Hakamada worked. The finalized ruling deemed these items to belong to him and formed the greatest basis for his conviction.
It is said the bloodstains on the articles of clothing leading to the conviction appeared red. During the retrial request hearing, Hakamada's lawyers conducted an experiment in which bloodstained clothing was left in miso, and found the red color of the blood turned a blackish brown, a result that contradicted the finalized ruling.
The high court decision that allowed a retrial to go ahead recognized the credibility of this experiment, and accepted it as new evidence warranting a not guilty verdict. It judged there to have been a high possibility that investigative authorities fabricated their evidence.
Prosecutors, meanwhile, conducted an experiment of their own and claimed that the "redness of the blood remained."
However, the high court ruling found it problematic that prosecutors took their photographic evidence while shining an incandescent light bulb on the bloodstained sample cloth.
The judge also stood by for the removal of some of the samples, and rejected the credibility of the photographic evidence on the grounds that it did not faithfully reflect the color of the bloodstains, as it was easier for the redness to appear when shining an incandescent light on it, as opposed to under fluorescent lighting.
In three-way discussions held at the Shizuoka District Court, the Shizuoka District Public Prosecutors Office requested a three-month extension to say whether it would try to prove Hakamada was guilty in the retrial.
Sources say that they are analyzing how bloodstains look under incandescent and fluorescent lighting through an expert, and are considering whether to submit this as evidence to the court to support their position that Hakamada is guilty.
However, some public prosecution officials remain wary, and it is believed that they are carefully assessing the results of the supplementary investigation while awaiting the decision of a higher prosecutor's office.
(Japanese original by Shintaro Iguchi, Tokyo City News Department, and Kenta Oka, Shizuoka Bureau)
The entire story can be read at:
https://mainichi.jp/english/articles/20230624/p2a/00m/0na/015000c
PUBLISHER'S NOTE: I am monitoring this case/issue/resource. Keep your eye on the Charles Smith Blog for reports on developments. The Toronto Star, my previous employer for more than twenty incredible years, has put considerable effort into exposing the harm caused by Dr. Charles Smith and his protectors - and into pushing for reform of Ontario's forensic pediatric pathology system. The Star has a "topic" section which focuses on recent stories related to Dr. Charles Smith. It can be found at: http://www.thestar.com/topic/charlessmith. Information on "The Charles Smith Blog Award"- and its nomination process - can be found at: http://smithforensic.blogspot.com/2011/05/charles-smith-blog-award-nominations.html Please send any comments or information on other cases and issues of interest to the readers of this blog to: hlevy15@gmail.com. Harold Levy: Publisher: The Charles Smith Blog;
SEE BREAKDOWN OF SOME OF THE ON-GOING INTERNATIONAL CASES (OUTSIDE OF THE CONTINENTAL USA) THAT I AM FOLLOWING ON THIS BLOG, AT THE LINK BELOW: HL
https://www.blogger.com/blog/post/edit/120008354894645705/47049136857587929
FINAL WORD: (Applicable to all of our wrongful conviction cases): "Whenever there is a wrongful conviction, it exposes errors in our criminal legal system, and we hope that this case — and lessons from it — can prevent future injustices.
Lawyer Radha Natarajan;
Executive Director: New England Innocence Project;
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FINAL, FINAL WORD: "Since its inception, the Innocence Project has pushed the criminal legal system to confront and correct the laws and policies that cause and contribute to wrongful convictions. They never shied away from the hard cases — the ones involving eyewitness identifications, confessions, and bite marks. Instead, in the course of presenting scientific evidence of innocence, they've exposed the unreliability of evidence that was, for centuries, deemed untouchable." So true!
Christina Swarns: Executive Director: The Innocence Project;
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YET ANOTHER FINAL WORD:
David Hammond, one of Broadwater’s attorneys who sought his exoneration, told the Syracuse Post-Standard, “Sprinkle some junk science onto a faulty identification, and it’s the perfect recipe for a wrongful conviction.”
https://deadline.com/2021/11/alice-sebold-lucky-rape-conviction-overturned-anthony-broadwater-1234880143/
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