Estimated read time: 4-5 minutes
- Hiromu Sakahara, posthumously granted a retrial, died in 2011 serving life imprisonment.
- His family fought for justice, citing forced confession and new evidence of innocence.
- Japan's retrial system faces scrutiny, prompting potential legal reforms to ensure prompt justice.
TOKYO — When a Japanese court granted Hiromu Sakahara a retrial, there was no defendant in the dock celebrating the prospect of freedom.
Instead, family members gathered around his grave to share news that he had longed to hear in life after a decades-long fight for justice.
Sakahara died in 2011 while serving a life sentence for murdering a store manager in the rural town of Hino in 1984 – based on a confession that he said was forced.
A rare posthumous retrial is expected to begin soon, but the long delays in Sakahara's case added momentum to calls for reform to speed up the excruciatingly long process people must go through to seek redress in Japan.
"I regret that we could not save my father from prison," his son Koji Sakahara told CNN.
"While I am happy about the decision to grant a retrial, it's still incredibly painful," said Koji, now 64 with hair that's turned grey during the long campaign to prove his father's innocence.
Japan has a reputation for "hostage justice," a term used to describe the detention of suspects for questioning, often without access to legal counsel, for far longer than the law allows in other countries.
With a conviction rate of over 99%, human rights groups say innocent people are being jailed for crimes they didn't commit.
Sakahara first filed for a retrial in 2001. Even after his death a decade later, his family kept pushing for a new hearing, which was repeatedly challenged by prosecutors in all three levels of court.
Sakahara's long wait for justice inspired a new bill that, if passed, could make it harder for prosecutors to appeal decisions granting a retrial.
Officials within Japan's Justice Department argue that the proposed changes could undermine the finality of convictions.
However, Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi – a conservative who counts Britain's Margaret Thatcher among her political idols – has backed the legislation, telling parliament last month that it's vital to ensuring the retrial system delivers prompt justice.
"It is unacceptable for innocent people to be punished," she said. "If a final judgment convicts an innocent person, that person must be promptly exonerated."
A quiet life upended
Koji Sakahara says in the early 80s his family was living an ordinary life in Hino, a quiet town about an hour's drive east of Kyoto.
"Everyone in our family was working; we had no financial struggles, and I believe we were having a happy life with our father, who was very devoted to his children," he said.
But their world turned upside down in Dec. 1984 after the disappearance of a local liquor store manager in a suspected murder-robbery. Her body was found a month later in a field.
Sakahara was initially called in by police for questioning because he was a frequent customer to the store. However, he was released shortly after his wife was able to prove that he was drinking somewhere else on the night, according to Koji.
But police returned three years later to question him, and after a day of interrogation, he confessed to the crime.
Sakahara later told his son he'd been beaten and kicked and only buckled after officers began to direct the threats at people around him, said Koji, who had confronted his father about his confession.
The next day, police took Sakahara away. "He never came home again," Koji recalled. Sakahara argued his innocence during his trial but was convicted based on police claims that he was able to lead them to the location of the body, and separately the site of the safe that was stolen from the liquor store.
Throughout the 24 years Sakahara was locked up, his son and other family members would visit him and tell him to hang on, as they fought to get his case reheard. "You can't give up in a place like this," they would tell him.
But his father contracted pneumonia in 2011, and after two decades in prison, his body was too weak to fight it.
Sakahara passed away that year. "You don't have to fight anymore. It's okay to let go. You've worked so hard until now," his sister told their father moments before his heart stopped beating, Koji recalled.
All these years, the stigma stuck no matter how hard the family fought to change the narrative. "People viewed us as a family of a criminal," said Koji, adding that his mother used to get harassing calls, heckling "murderer."
The family won a retrial based on negative film stored within evidence files that their lawyer argued shows that police may have guided Sakahara to the location of the body.
Sakahara is believed to be only the second person granted a posthumous trial in post-war Japan.
The first was in 1985, when six years after her death, Shigeko Fuji was acquitted of killing her husband. She spent 27 years in prison for the crime that evidence ultimately suggested was committed by an intruder.
Two years ago, another man, Iwao Hakamata, was acquitted after spending more than 46 years on death row for a murder his lawyer said he was forced to admit.
