The Liberal Democratic Party on Thursday approved a government proposal to ban prosecutors “in principle” from appealing a retrial order, aiming to shorten the retrial process for those who might have been wrongly convicted to clear their names.
The approval paves the way for the revision — a top priority for the government — to be approved by the Cabinet on Friday and be submitted to the current parliamentary session, which runs through July 17. It was approved by an LDP panel Wednesday night.
For the past 1½ months, LDP lawmakers and the Justice Ministry have been at odds over the revision of the retrial system under the criminal procedural law. The ministry, which oversees the Public Prosecutor’s Office, had wanted to retain the prosecutors’ right to appeal, while the LDP — siding with retrial victims — said it should be banned.
Under the approved proposal, however, prosecutors would still be allowed to appeal a retrial order if there is “sufficient evidence” to pursue an appeal. They would be required to disclose the reasoning behind it.
LDP lawmakers had been adamant that prosecutors should not be given that right, but eventually gave in, given that time was running out for submitting the legislation in the current parliamentary session.
“We had doubts whether this would actually prevent prosecutors from easily appealing,” said LDP lawmaker Masahiko Shibayama, who heads a parliamentary group on retrial revisions. “But we thought it was better to move forward, even if only by half a step.”
The prosecutors’ appeal ban was also included in the main text of the legislation rather than in a supplementary provision — tantamount to a footnote — in the previous government proposal, which marked a compromise on the Justice Ministry side.
The legislation will be subject to review every five years.
A retrial allows a guilty verdict to be reexamined when new evidence emerges, or when advances in investigative techniques, such as improved DNA testing, cast doubt on the conviction.
Several high-profile murder cases help to illustrate the complexities of the process.
In 1986, a female junior high school student was found dead in Fukui Prefecture, and the suspect, Shoshi Maekawa, was arrested largely based on witness testimony. However, he was found not guilty at the district court level, bringing the reliability of the witnesses’ accounts into question. A higher court later found him guilty, ruling that the witness testimony was credible. The Supreme Court upheld this ruling, finalizing the guilty verdict.
When Maekawa’s defense team filed for a retrial, the Nagoya High Court’s Kanazawa branch granted him one in 2011. The actual retrial, however, did not take place for years due, in part, to prosecutorial appeals. A second…