Photo/Illutration Lawyers use banners to announce the Osaka High Court upheld a decision to allow a retrial in the "Hino-cho incident" on Feb. 27. (Yuki Shibata)

OSAKA--The Osaka High Court on Feb. 27 upheld a lower court decision to allow a retrial for a man who died in prison after being convicted of murder based on spotty evidence.

The high court dismissed prosecutors’ appeal, meaning the bereaved family of the convict has moved a step closer to clearing his name.

This is the first time in postwar Japan for a high court to allow a retrial for a dead convict whose life sentence or death sentence has been finalized.

The case is known as the “Hino-cho incident” because the crime occurred in Hino town in Shiga Prefecture.

A 69-year-old manager of a liquor shop in Hino went missing in December 1984 along with a safe at the store. Her body and the safe were found in the town in 1985.

Hiromu Sakahara was arrested on suspicion of robbery-murder after confessing to the crime during questioning by Shiga prefectural police.

But during his trial, he pleaded innocent, saying police officers assaulted him and verbally abused him during questioning to force him to confess.

The Otsu District Court accepted the assertion that his confession was unreliable, but it convicted him and sentenced him to life in prison in 1995.

The court cited circumstantial evidence, such as his fingerprint found on a mirror in a desk drawer at the liquor shop, in its ruling.

The Osaka High Court in 1997 upheld the guilty verdict and sentence. It said the circumstantial evidence alone was not enough to prove Sakahara committed the robbery-murder, but the ruling said the essential part of his confession was reliable.

In 2000, the Supreme Court finalized the life sentence.

Sakahara died of illness in 2011 at age 75 while serving the sentence.

The following year, his family requested a posthumous retrial, focusing again on the reliability of Sakahara’s confession and how to treat the circumstantial evidence.

The Otsu District Court decided to allow the retrial in 2018. Its ruling said that, based on the opinions of doctors commissioned by lawyers representing Sakahara’s family and other information, the confession was unreliable.

For example, words in the confession contradicted details about the woman’s dead body.

The court also said it was possible that Sakahara left the fingerprint on the mirror when the woman lent it to him.

Therefore, there was “reasonable doubt” about Sakahara’s guilt in the crime, the ruling said.
Prosecutors filed an immediate appeal against the retrial.

They argued that the essential part of Sakahara’s confession--that he strangled the woman from behind—matched the wounds on her body.

They also argued that the woman would not have lent him the mirror because it was broken.

They said the fingerprint must have been left on the mirror when he killed her.