Photo/Illutration The Supreme Court’s building (Asahi Shimbun file photo)

The First Petty Bench of the Supreme Court on Nov. 21 for the first time overturned a guilty verdict of murder that was reached under the citizen-judge system and upheld by a high court.

The top court ordered that the case be retried at the Tokyo High Court, which had upheld an 11-year prison sentence for Park Jung-hyun, 47, who was convicted of murdering his wife.

Park’s defense team had long argued that procedural mistakes stemming from the lay-judge system prevented critical evidence from being presented in court and led to the “surprising” guilty rulings.

Park’s wife, 38, was found dead at their home in Tokyo’s Bunkyo Ward in August 2016. The cause of death was suffocation.

Prosecutors argued that Park, a former associate managing editor of comic magazine Morning, had choked her on a mattress in a room on the first floor of their home.

When she was near death, he threw her down a flight of stairs to make it look like a suicide, they said.

Prosecutors said that such actions by Park explained the traces of his wife’s urine found on the mattress and the deep wound on her forehead.

Park has maintained his innocence, saying his wife committed suicide by hanging herself from the handrails on the stairs.

His defense lawyers argued that his wife was mentally unstable and suffered from postpartum depression.

On the day of her death, the defense said, she grabbed a kitchen knife and got into scuffle with Park on the mattress.

Park sought shelter from her in a room on the second floor with their children, and she hanged herself during that time, the defense said.

The wound to her forehead was caused when she was lashing about after the scuffle, the lawyers said.

“It cannot be said that his wife died because of the defendant’s actions,” the defense said.

His case was tried by citizen judges at the Tokyo District Court, which found him guilty in March 2019 and handed down an 11-year prison sentence.

The ruling cited a “lack of blood stains.”

The court rejected Park’s version of what happened, saying if his wife was conscious and able to move around when she injured her forehead, there would have been severe bleeding and many blood stains.

Park appealed the ruling.

At the Tokyo High Court, the defense said there were more blood stains at the scene, but due to procedural limits under the lay-judge system, they could not present this evidence at the district court trial.

The Tokyo High Court in January 2021 acknowledged mistakes in terms of evidentiary facts at the first trial.

But the high court denied the woman’s death was a suicide.

“If she was injured while conscious, there should have been traces of blood flowing (from the wound) or blood being wiped on her face and hands, but they were not found,” the high court said.

The high court upheld the guilty ruling.

The defense appealed to the Supreme Court, arguing that the guilty verdict was based on an error of fact and problems in the trial procedure.

The lawyers said that during the first and second trials, “the number of blood stains” and the “blood on the dead body’s face and other areas” were not clearly a point of issue.

The defense argued that they “had no chance to present evidence or a counter argument,” and the guilty verdicts came as “a surprise.”

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