Sakahara died in 2011 while serving a life sentence for the 1984 murder of a store manager in the rural town of Hino – based on a confession he claimed was forced.
When a Japanese court granted Hiromu Sakahara a new trial, there was no defendant in the dock celebrating the prospect of freedom. Instead, family members gathered around his grave to share the news he so longed to hear in life, after a decades-long fight for justice.
Sakahara died in 2011 while serving a life sentence for the 1984 murder of a store manager in the rural town of Hino – based on a confession he claimed was coerced.
A rare posthumous retrial is expected to begin soon, but the long delays in Sakahara’s case have given new impetus to calls for reforms to speed up the extremely time-consuming process people have to go through to obtain redress in Japan.
“I regret that we were unable to save my father from prison,” his son, Koji Sakahara, tells CNN. “While I am happy with the decision to grant a new trial, it is still incredibly painful,” says Koji, now 64 and graying hair from the long campaign to prove his father’s innocence.
Sakahara first filed a request for a new trial in 2001. Even after his death a decade later, his family continued to insist on a new trial, which was repeatedly challenged by prosecutors in all three court instances.
Japan is known for practicing so-called “hostage justice,” a term used to describe the detention of suspects for interrogation, often without access to legal assistance, for a much longer period than permitted by law in other countries. With a conviction rate exceeding 99%, human rights groups say innocent people are being imprisoned for crimes they did not commit.
Sakahara’s long wait for justice has inspired a new bill that, if passed, could make it more difficult for prosecutors to appeal the decision to grant a new trial.
Japan’s Justice Department officials argue that the proposed changes could compromise the strength of convictions. However, Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi – a right-wing politician who counts Britain’s Margaret Thatcher among her political idols – has backed the new legislation, saying in parliament last month that it is vital to ensuring the retrial system delivers speedy justice.
“It is unacceptable for innocent people to be punished,” said Takaichi. “If a sentence has convicted an innocent person, that person must be promptly exonerated.”
A peaceful life turned inside out
Koji Sakahara says that in the early 1980s, his family lived a normal life in Hino, a quiet town about an hour’s drive east of Kyoto. “Everyone in our family worked; we had no financial difficulties and I believe we led a happy life with our father, who was very dedicated to his children,” she recalls.
But his world was turned upside down in December 1984, after the disappearance of the manager of a local liquor store in a case suspected of being a robbery and murder. Her body was found a month later in a field.
Sakahara was initially called by the police to be questioned, as he was a regular customer at the store. However, he was released shortly after his wife was able to prove that he was drinking elsewhere that night. But the police returned three years later to question him again and, after a day of questioning, he confessed to the crime.
Sakahara later told his son that he had been beaten and kicked and that he only relented after the agents began directing the threats at those around him, says Koji, who confronted his father about his confession.
The next day, the police took Sakahara away. “He never came home again,” Koji remembers. Sakahara maintained his innocence during the trial, but was convicted based on police allegations that he had led them to the location of the body and then to the location of the safe that had been stolen from the liquor store.
Throughout the 24 years Sakahara was imprisoned, his son and other relatives visited him and told him to tough it out, while fighting to have his case reexamined. “You can’t give up in a place like this,” they told him.
But Sakahara contracted pneumonia in 2011, and after two decades in prison, his body was too weak to fight the disease.
Sakahara passed away that year. “You don’t need to fight anymore. There’s no harm in giving up. You’ve worked so hard until now”, said the daughter to her father, moments before his heart stopped beating, Koji recalls.
All these years, the stigma remained, no matter how hard the family fought to change the narrative. “People saw us as a criminal’s family,” says Koji, adding that his mother used to receive harassing calls, with people shouting “murderer” at her.
The family obtained a new trial based on a photographic roll that was in the case file and which, according to their lawyer, shows that the police may have led Sakahara to the place where the body was.
Sakahara is believed to be only the second person to be granted a posthumous trial in post-war Japan.
The first time this happened was in 1985, when, six years after her death, Shigeko Fuji was acquitted of her husband’s murder. She spent 27 years in prison for a crime that evidence ultimately suggested was committed by an intruder.
Two years ago, another man, , was acquitted after spending more than 46 years on death row for a murder that, according to his lawyer, he was forced to confess.
Long-awaited renovations
Part of the problem in Japan is the lack of legal representation for those brought in for questioning for an alleged crime.
Japan has not made access to lawyers during interrogations an absolute right, despite being a member of the Group of Seven (G7) – an intergovernmental forum with the US and other Western allies that frequently draws attention to the importance of human rights and the rule of law. These failures have been criticized by the United Nations Human Rights Committee.
The Japanese legal system has also been criticized for giving too much power to prosecutors. According to the proposed amendment, they will only be able to appeal a new trial decision if there are “sufficient reasons”.
The country’s Ministry of Justice opposed the changes, claiming that limiting the scope of appeals could “compromise institutional safeguards that ensure careful and fair judicial decisions.” There is also “a significant risk that this will fundamentally alter the nature of interrogations — which play a crucial role in gathering evidence — and substantially compromise their effectiveness,” the spokesperson added.
Some experts in criminal law, however, say that this reform should have been done a long time ago.
Law professor Tomonobu Ishida, from Meiji University in Tokyo, considers that delays in the fight for justice by unjustly convicted individuals constitute “one of the most serious problems in the Japanese criminal justice system”. “In some retrial cases, decades passed before wrongful convictions were corrected. During that time, defendants and their families often suffer irreparable physical, psychological and social harm,” he explains.
Professor Koji Tabuchi, a criminal law expert at Kyushu University in Fukuoka, says it is time for prosecutors to abandon the zero-sum mentality when an individual’s freedom is at stake. “When judges declare a defendant innocent in Japan, prosecutors think, ‘We lost.’ But do they have to think that way?” he asks.
Those awaiting justice in prison are not getting any younger either, points out another Japanese criminal law expert. “Many of the defendants who request a new trial are very old and, in fact, have no time left,” warns Kana Sasakura, a law professor at Konan University in the western city of Kobe.
Sakahara lawyer Ryota Ishigawa, who has fought for a new trial for 20 years, feels the decision to grant a new trial came too late. “As a defense team, we are deeply disappointed. There is a fundamental injustice in the system as a whole. We are frustrated that we cannot celebrate with the defendant,” he says.
For Koji, change comes too late — years of fighting for justice for his father have left him burdened with guilt and regret.
“If the new trial had been granted while he was alive, he would still be here,” he says. “I sincerely hope that Japan harmonizes its legal system with that of other countries as soon as possible, so that no more victims of wrongful convictions will suffer.”
