I was appointed as an assistant in 1968 and later as an Assistant Professor of the Division of Forensic Medicine, School of Medicine, Tohoku University and had been engaged in forensic autopsies in heinous criminal cases in Miyagi and Yamagata Prefectures as a forensic practitioner and in research and education in the field of forensic medicine as a government officer for 17 years. During that time, I was dispatched by the Japanese Society of Legal Medicine to Okinawa as the 23rd Legal Medicine Consultant for Okinawa in the first half of 1978 and conducted forensic autopsies, etc. in a variety of cases there for half a year.

I was employed by Nihon University as a professor of forensic medicine in June 1985, and was responsible for forensic autopsies in various cases in Saitama Prefecture, where I was born. I reached the mandatory retirement age as a professor of the laboratory (of forensic medicine) in 2008, and became an Emeritus Professor of Forensic Medicine at Nihon University in April 2011. For 40 years of this time, I conducted about 2,000 legal autopsies on victims or suspected victims of criminal cases, and also conducted some consented autopsies for investigations on cause of death. As a result, I have received letters of appreciation from the Chiefs of the Miyagi, Okinawa, and Saitama Prefectural Police Headquarters as well as from the chief of the Saitama District Public Prosecutors Office, and was awarded the Medal of Police Cooperation by the Commissioner General of the National Police Agency in March 2008.

During the first half of my career as a forensic pathologist, the police officers and prosecutors I worked with in Miyagi, Okinawa, and Saitama Prefectures did their duty faithfully and I didn’t find so many problems in their attitude toward investigation, but during the last decade, I found various problems with the attitudes and responses of the police officers and prosecutors to investigation activities (e.g. full investigations that should have been done were not done, and adequate scientific reviews were not carried out by the investigators and expert witnesses, etc.). I worked as a Director of the Japanese Society of Legal Medicine from 1998 to 2003, and also held important posts within Nihon University such as the Director for Planning/Student Affairs and the Associate Dean of the School of Medicine, etc.

Under these circumstances, I was increasingly commissioned to conduct reexamination of well-known cases. In some of the other cases than those in the above-mentioned four prefectures, I encountered penal judgments and proceedings based on the treatment of criminal evidence which I could never have imagined from my past experience, and felt both surprise and anger in some cases.

One such example was the Yamanaka Hot Springs Incident (which occurred in July 1972). Both the first trial and appeal court sentenced the accused to capital punishment. Then one day I had a visit from Mr. Akio Sugeno, a lawyer and my fellow schoolmate and dormitory mate at Tohoku University. As a result of our reviewing the documents, identifying doubtful points in the scientific evidence thus far, and having an appropriate forensic medical expert inspect the evidence over again, the case was remanded by the Supreme Court (in 1989), and the accused acquitted by the Nagoya High Court in July 1990 (Please refer to “Houigaku Genba no Shinsou [The Realities of On-The-Scene Forensic Medicine)” (Shodensha Shuppan) for details.]

In relation to this case, I was involved with the junior-high school girl murder case in Fukui (which occurred in March 1986). A 21-year-old suspect (Mr. Shoji Maekawa) was arrested in March the following year, and acquitted of murder at the first trial (in 1990), but the appeal court (in 1995) sentenced him to seven years of imprisonment, and the case was brought before the Supreme Court. I was commissioned to conduct an expert examination by the defense team, and after reviewing the case records and the verdicts, I found a situation beyond the bounds of common sense. It is a common practice for the expert witness (usually a professor or an associate professor of forensic medicine) to submit a written expert opinion if he or she has conducted a legal autopsy of a murder. However, while the written expert opinion of this case had several figures attached to it, there were no photos from the legal autopsy. The police officer who witnessed the legal autopsy wrote a report on the autopsy, but this document, too, had only figures and didn’t have any photos attached to it, either.

I submitted an opinion brief in August 1996, stating that such a practice was unimaginably odd under modern criminal laws, that there was a discrepancy between the wound and the two kitchen knives identified as the murder weapons. The Supreme Court rejected the appeal (in November 1997) and the accused was proved guilty, but, just like the verdict of the Supreme Court on the murder case in the Ashikaga Incident (in May 1996), my expert examination was not referred to at all.

Then after an appeal was lodged to the Supreme Court for a retrial of this case, a host of autopsy photos which had never been laid before the court were put forward (in summer 2008). When I examined the autopsy photos and other materials submitted to the Kanazawa Branch of the Nagoya High Court with lawyers, I found the following unexpected facts:

1.Though I couldn’t identify any bloodstain on the (backside of the) right hand fingers of the victim shown on the crime scene photos, the newly disclosed autopsy photos of the middle section of the fourth and fifth fingers on the (backside of the) right hand clearly had bloodstains.

2.On the cranial base, the submitted figures showed the bone fractures described as “extending from the right anterior cranial fossa through the cranial base to the left lacerated foramen where it ended,” but in addition to the bone fractures, the figures didn’t contain the fractures clearly shown in the photo of the right anterior cranial fossa.

3.Although the crime scene photos showed a white quilt cover (with a futon mattress inside) with a large bloodstain on it, the newly disclosed evidence didn’t include the white quilt, and the futon mattress was kept in storage in an exposed manner. Then when I inspected them in detail, I found that;

4.The crime scene photos which were later submitted showed one bloodstain in front of a Japanese-style chest of drawers, but the bloodstain was not shown on the previous scene photos.

5.Compared with the previous photos showing the bloodstains under the table with a heater underneath, at least four more bloodstains were shown in the newly disclosed photos.

6.There was a telephone set on the (blue) carpet cover of an electric carpet body in the previous photo, but the newly submitted photos showed the telephone set off the (blue) carpet cover.

7.There was a photo taken during the on-site investigation which showed the victim with the unbuttoned blouse, but the first autopsy photo showed the blouse buttoned up again.

As stated above, the newly submitted photos revealed the slapdash on-site observations and their difference from the results of the autopsy, on the basis of which I could make a detailed review of the evidence over again. That is, the measure captured in the photo made it possible to observe the wound by magnifying it to the actual size, and other photos from different angles allowed us to inspect the details of the wound three-dimensionally. Summarizing these observation process and results, I submitted the second opinion brief on May 1st, 2009. Then I was faced with inexplicable (unpleasing/vulgar) communications with the prosecutors, but I’d like to omit them here.

After the two questionings of the expert witnesses (Oshida on the defenders’ side and Ishiyama on the prosecutors’ side) on January 7th and 20th of this year, the retrial was decided to be initiated (at 9:30am on November 30, 2011). The document on the decision of the retrial consisted of 67 pages in all (with 52 pages of text), and I was very surprised that it described all the doubtful points I had pointed out in my opinion briefs and written expert opinions, including (1) the novelty of the new evidence, (2) the stab wound of the victim (there was a reasonable doubt in the judgment of the final verdict based on forensic medicine), (3) the blood test (according to the experiment carried out by Oshida on the luminol test of the new evidence, there was a reasonable doubt about the factual finding of the definitive judgment based on the premise that the dashboard had blood on it), and (4) the criminal profile (it was not an act of a person who had diminished responsibility as recognized by the definitive judgment) etc.

Regarding this case, as the Nagoya High Public Prosecutors’ Office had filed an “objection” on December 5, the case will be tried at the Nagoya High Court, and the third round has been initiated.

In the case of Ashikaga (which occurred in May 1990), Mr. Sugaya was arrested one year after the murder as a result of the DNA testing which was used at that time. Though I submitted an expert examination report stating that the DNA type of Mr. Sugaya’s hair which had been sent from within the detention center after the appeal court (life imprisonment) was different from the DNA type determined by the judgment in September 1997, the Supreme Court gave the final judgment of life imprisonment (in July 2000). Then it was in March 2010 that a long legal effort for retrial at last resulted in the judgment of acquittal (or rather innocence) based on the latest DNA testing method. This process clearly shows the inadequacy of the realistic approach adopted in criminal trials at least for about 10 years after 1997.

As for the retrial request in the so-called Fukawa murder case (which occurred in 1967), as the prosecutor requested a DNA testing 43 years after the occurrence of the murder, the court sentenced acquittal after rejection of opposition (in May 2011) (Please refer to the column 【DNA Testing and How It Should Be Used in Criminal Investigations; http://scienceportal.jp/HotTopics/opinion/155.html】 in “Opinion” on August 23, 2010). Regarding this case, astonishingly enough, it became clear only after the retrial was initiated that a host of evidence hadn’t been submitted to the court, and the new evidence led to the sentence of acquittal 44 years after the murder (during this period of time Mr. Takao Sugiyama and Mr. Shoji Sakurai were imprisoned for 29 years).

In relation to the TEPCO (Tokyo Electric Power Company, Incorporated) employee murder case (which occurred in March 1997), Mr. G, a Nepalese, was arrested, and though the first trial acquitted him (in April 2000), the appeal court reversed the judgment and sentenced him to life imprisonment (in December 2000). I was commissioned to inspect the sperm during the appeal, and conducted a month-long experiment on the sperm of five Nepalese living in Japan and 3 Japanese at around the same time of the year when the murder occurred. I submitted a written expert opinion describing that more than 20 days had passed before the sperm was discovered on the site (which means that the Nepalese suspect was not the true culprit) (in July 2001).

The Supreme Court, however, gave the final judgment of life imprisonment (in October 2003). As a result of the DNA testing on the biological fluid and hair of the victim collected from the crime scene conducted in response to the retrial decision later on, it was reported by the media that a new DNA type was found which was different from that of Mr. G (The Yomiuri Shimbun, July 21 and July 27, 2011). Additionally, it was also said that police had detected saliva (of O-type blood) on the victim’s breast that was different from the suspect's, but this information was not disclosed (The Yomiuri Shimbun, September 4, 2011). I just can’t help being appalled at the bizarre practice of the investigators concerned who didn’t perform the latest DNA testing despite the fact that they could have done it before the final judgment of the Supreme Court and who “did perform it only after the retrial was initiated.”

Mr. Akio Sugeno, a lawyer who is familiar with criminal trials in the United States, says, “I have sat in on many criminal trials in the United States and talked with the judges and attorneys. According to the judicial precedents of the United States Supreme Court, the prosecutor has an obligation to disclose evidence even if it is beneficial to the accused, and if the prosecutor suppresses the evidence, he or she could be held criminally liable on the charge of contempt of court (In actual cases, however, it seems that it is not uncommon for the prosecutors to suppress evidence materials). Compared with this legal system of the United States, they often poked fun at me, saying, criminal lawyers in Japan look like they are doing magic tricks because they have to defend the accused without knowing the content of the evidence in the hands of the prosecutor. I believe the cases of Fukui and TEPCO, etc. will show us the future direction of criminal judicial reform.”

When I was asked to give some comments on the Fukui case for a TV program by NHK (Japan Broadcasting Corporation) entitled “Today’s Close-up,” which was broadcast on the evening of the day when the retrial of the Fukui case was decided (November 30), I said, “Asked if the murder weapon matches the wound, I will say it definitely doesn’t. I mean, it hasn’t been verified that Mr. Maekawa is the real criminal.” The latter half of this TV program covered an example case where disclosed evidence actually opened the way for an acquittal in the United States. The following comment of Mr. Akira Kitani (a former High Court judge and professor in the Graduate School of Law, Hosei University) struck me deeply: “If it’s impossible to demand the prosecutors to present all the evidence they have, they should at least be ordered to produce a tabulated list of the evidence.”

Not only the evidence falsification case of the Osaka District Public Prosecutors Office’s special investigation department, but also the criminal trials on the ensuing responses have come to receive attention, and we will have to cast a stern eye on the evaluation of factual findings in the jury trials involving the disclosure of evidence in the possession of the prosecutors (police officers), especially the evidence beneficial to the defense.

It is said that the purpose of a criminal trial is not to hunt for the truth but to make judgments on whether the accused is guilty or not on the basis of the evidence submitted to the court. Forensic pathologists, including myself, are engaged in the legal autopsies of dead bodies in the hope of allowing the officials concerned to make effective use of the forensic findings to grasp the true picture of each case, if at all possible, under the recognition that it is crucial to place the due responsibility on the criminals based on scientific evidence. On the other hand, while I seriously pursue reexaminations using scientific methods thinking that false charges can never be excused, I of course believe that slapdash examinations and investigations which overlook the criminals can never be tolerated, either.

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