It can be said that the recent case of a retrial has revealed the importance of evidence disclosure by prosecutors.
In ruling on the retrial of the so-called Matsubase incident in which a man was stabbed to death in 1985 in Kumamoto Prefecture, the Kumamoto District Court found the defendant not guilty of the charge of murder. Prosecutors abandoned their bid for an appeal. As a result, acquittal has become final and binding for Koki Miyata, who was imprisoned for 13 years after being convicted of murder and other charges.
Given the lack of material evidence produced, the prosecutors relied on the defendant's confession to prove their case. The new evidence, which played a key role in reversing the guilty decision, was a piece of cloth the defense counsel had found while looking through evidence at the prosecutors' office in preparation for requesting the retrial.
Miyata is said to have confessed to fatally stabbing the man, saying, "I tore off my shirt's left sleeve and bound it around the hilt of a knife then burned the cloth after committing the crime." Given that the cloth that was claimed to have been burned was discovered, it was natural to determine in the retrial that "there is a contradiction with objective fact in the important part of his confession."
There is no alternative but to say that investigations to substantiate the confession at the time were conducted in a sloppy way. There is a possibility that if the prosecutors had presented the cloth in a court hearing for the initial trial, the defendant might not have been found guilty.
Evidence collected with the use of taxpayers' money and on public authority should not be monopolized by prosecutors alone while defense lawyers are denied access. Prosecutors are called on to disclose evidence even if it is disadvantageous to them and to work toward realizing the unraveling of the truth and fair court hearings.
They should bear in mind the lessons learned from this retrial.
Review past judgment
Recent years have seen a series of cases in which evidence not disclosed by prosecutors in the initial trial was discovered during the proceedings for requesting a retrial, and this led to defendants being acquitted.
In the so-called Fukawa case, in which two defendants were acquitted in a retrial, eyewitness accounts that indicated the real culprit was someone other than the accused, opened the way for holding the retrial.
The Criminal Procedure Code, which was revised in 2016, makes it mandatory for the prosecution to disclose a list of all collected evidence to defense lawyers. But this system has not been adopted for retrials, leaving whether to disclose evidence to the discretion of prosecutors and courts.
How to disclose evidence in retrials is an important subject to study.
The retrial of the Matsubase case was concluded after the first hearing, which lasted a mere 30 minutes. It was hoped that the problematic points of investigation in the case would be revealed through such processes as cross-examining investigators as witnesses, but the court prioritized concluding the retrial as soon as possible.
With the passage of 34 years since the incident, 85-year-old Miyata has become bedridden with dementia and other ailments. The district court might have taken into account his physical condition.
Nevertheless, a probe into the mistaken judgment should not be neglected. Although the evidence to substantiate the prosecution's case was weak in the Matsubase incident, the courts found the defendant guilty of the charge in the initial trial by attaching too much importance to the confession. The courts, for their part, should reflect on this.
(From The Yomiuri Shimbun, March 30, 2019)
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