have been at odds<\/a> over the revision of the retrial system under the criminal procedural law. The ministry, which oversees the Public Prosecutor\u2019s Office, had wanted to retain the prosecutors\u2019 right to appeal, while the LDP \u2014 siding with retrial victims \u2014 said it should be banned.<\/p>\nUnder the approved proposal, however, prosecutors would still be allowed to appeal a retrial order if there is \u201csufficient evidence\u201d to pursue an appeal. They would be required to disclose the reasoning behind it.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe had doubts whether this would actually prevent prosecutors from easily appealing,\u201d said LDP lawmaker Masahiko Shibayama, who heads a parliamentary group on retrial revisions. \u201cBut we thought it was better to move forward, even if only by half a step.\u201d<\/p>\n
The prosecutors\u2019 appeal ban was also included in the main text of the legislation rather than in a supplementary provision \u2014 tantamount to a footnote \u2014 in the previous government proposal, which marked a compromise on the Justice Ministry side.<\/p>\n
The legislation will be subject to review every five years.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Several high-profile murder cases help to illustrate the complexities of the process.<\/p>\n
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\u2019 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.<\/p>\n
When Maekawa\u2019s defense team filed for a retrial, the Nagoya High Court\u2019s 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…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Liberal Democratic Party on Thursday approved a government proposal to ban prosecutors \u201cin principle\u201d from appealing a…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":42137,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[176],"tags":[234,6777,6776,177,708,179,5720,236,180,178,30193],"class_list":["post-42136","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-politics","tag-diet","tag-false-convictions","tag-iwao-hakamata","tag-japans-politics","tag-japanese-courts","tag-japanese-politics","tag-justice-ministry","tag-ldp","tag-politics","tag-politics-of-japan","tag-shoshi-maekawa"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42136","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=42136"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42136\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/42137"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=42136"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=42136"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=42136"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}