Retrial on Arsonist Suspects

Two defendants who has been sentenced life in prison were released from twenty-year custody on Tuesday. It was executed under the decision of Osaka Regional Court that ordered retrial of them, doubting investigation of police had been insufficient. The prosecution of those two defendants was mainly made based on their confession. The case was proved not to be about murder, but about violation of human rights by police which investigation had been relying on confession of arrested suspect.

In 1995, fire in a house in Higashi-sumiyoshi, Osaka City, killed eleven-year-old girl who was in the bathroom. Police arrested her mother, Keiko Aoki, and Aoki’s housemate, Tstsuhiro Boku, with suspect of arson and murder for ¥15 million of insurance money on the girl. The fire occurred from an automobile parked just exterior of the bathroom.

Police suspected that Aoki and Boku conspired a murder by putting fire on the car to kill the girl in collateral damage. In the interviews, policemen urged them to confess that they had committed murder and two suspects told them that they killed the girl along with police’s scenario. Two suspects, however, turned down their witnesses in the trial, claiming that their confession was coerced by police. Nevertheless, the court sentenced life in prison on them.

Aoki and Boku kept on requiring retrial from prison. It was seventeen years later from the case when Osaka District Court decided to have the retrial. Although the prosecutors office appealed invalidity of the decision, Osaka High Court dismissed it. The main reason was that the fire was possibly occurred by spontaneous combustion from leaked gasoline. The court found that there were some cases of the leak caused by high pressure inside tank in the same type of cars at the time.

Retrial often leads to a decision of innocent. In Ashikaga Incident in 1990, in which the man was suspected as committing of murder of a girl, the defendant was released with court decision in the retrial. In the murder case of a woman worker with Tokyo Electric Power Company in 1997, a Nepalese man was released from custody in fifteen years. One common element in those cases was that police made a story of crime and coerced the suspect to accept it.

After released from Wakayama Prison, Aoki firmly regretted her confession. “Fear and disappointment devastated myself and my rationality was collapsed. I had to apologize my daughter of my psychological suicide and false confession,” said Aoki in the press conference. One question is what the police will do to recover long period of life two defendants have lost.