Tokyo —
When a Japanese court granted Hiroshi Sakahara a retrial, he was not seen celebrating the prospect of freedom in the dock.
Instead, family members gathered around his grave to share the news he wanted to hear during his lifetime after decades of fighting for justice.
Sakahara died in 2011 while serving a life sentence for the murder of a store manager in rural Hino City in 1984, based on an allegedly coerced confession.
An unusual post-mortem retrial is expected to begin soon, but the long delay in Sakahara’s case has fueled calls for reforms to speed up the excruciatingly long process people must go through to seek redress in Japan.
His son, Koji Sakahara, told CNN, “I’m sorry that I couldn’t save my father from prison.”
“I’m happy about the decision to grant a retrial, but it’s still incredibly painful,” said Koji, now 64, whose hair has turned gray from the long campaign to prove his father’s innocence.
Japan is known for its “hostage justice.” This term refers to detaining suspects for interrogation without access to a lawyer for a much longer period of time than is permitted by law in other countries.
Human rights groups say the conviction rate is over 99%, with innocent people being imprisoned for crimes they didn’t commit.
Sakahara first applied for a retrial in 2001. Ten years after his death, his family continued to demand a new trial, which was repeatedly challenged by prosecutors in all three levels of court.
Sakahara’s long wait for justice has prompted the introduction of new legislation that, if passed, could make it harder for prosecutors to appeal decisions granting a new trial.
Japan’s Justice Department officials argue that the proposed changes could undermine the certainty of convictions.
But right-wing Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi, who counts Britain’s Margaret Thatcher among his political idols, supports the bill, telling parliament last month that a review system is essential to ensure it provides speedy justice.
“It is unacceptable that innocent people are punished,” she said. “If the final verdict finds an innocent person guilty, he must be immediately acquitted.”
Koji Sakahara says that in the early 1980s, his family lived an ordinary life in Hino, a quiet town about an hour’s drive east of Kyoto.
“Everyone in my family worked, I didn’t have to struggle financially, and I think they lived a happy life with a father who was very devoted to his children,” he said.
However, in December 1984, their world changed completely when the manager of a local liquor store disappeared on suspicion of robbery and murder. Her body was found in a field a month later.
The suspect, Sakahara, was originally a regular customer at the store, so he was called by the police and questioned. However, Koji said he was released soon after his wife was able to prove that he had been drinking elsewhere that night.
However, three years later the police questioned him again and after a day of interrogation he confessed to the crime.
Sakahara later told his son that he only buckled when he was punched and kicked and when police officers started threatening people around him, said Koji, who confronted his father about his confession.
The next day, the police took Sakahara away. “He never came home again,” Koji recalled. Sakahara maintained his innocence during his trial, but was convicted based on police claims that they were able to lead him to the location of the body and the safe that had been stolen from the liquor store.
During the 24 years that Sakahara was incarcerated, her son and other family members visited her and kept telling her, “Wait a minute,” as they fought for the case to be retried. “We can’t give up at a place like this,” they told him.
But his father contracted pneumonia in 2011, and after spending 20 years in prison, his body was too weak to resist.
Mr. Sakahara passed away that year. “You don’t have to fight anymore. It’s okay to let go. You’ve been working hard up until now,” Koji said to his father, just before his heart stopped.
No matter how hard the family fought to change the narrative over the years, the stigma persisted. “People saw us as a family of criminals,” Koji said, adding that her mother often received harassing phone calls calling her “murderers.”
The family won a retrial based on negative film preserved in the evidence file, and their lawyer argued that police may have led Sakahara to the location of the body.
Mr. Sakahara is believed to be the second person in postwar Japan to be granted a posthumous trial.
The first time was in 1985, six years after Shigeko Fuji’s death, when she was found not guilty of murdering her husband. She spent 27 years in prison for a crime that evidence ultimately suggested was committed by an intruder.
Two years ago, another man, Iwao Hakamada, was acquitted after spending more than 46 years on death row for a murder his lawyer said he had no choice but to admit.
Part of Japan’s problem is a lack of legal representation for people brought in for questioning on suspicion of crimes.
Japan does not have an absolute right to access to a lawyer during interrogations, despite being a member of the Group of Seven (G7), an intergovernmental forum of the United States and other Western allies that frequently emphasizes the importance of human rights and the rule of law. These failures have long drawn criticism from the United Nations Human Rights Committee.
Japan’s judicial system has also been criticized for giving too much power to prosecutors. Under the proposed changes, a retrial decision would only be appealable if there are “sufficient grounds.”
The country’s Ministry of Justice had opposed the changes, arguing that limiting the scope of appeals could “undermine institutional safeguards that ensure prudent and fair judicial decisions.”
“There is also a significant risk of fundamentally changing the nature of interrogations, which play a key role in evidence gathering, and significantly reducing their effectiveness,” the spokesperson added.
But some criminal law experts said the reforms were long overdue.
Tomonobu Ishida, a law professor at Meiji University in Tokyo, said delays in the trials of wrongfully convicted people are “one of the most serious problems in Japan’s criminal justice system.”
“In some retrial cases, it has taken decades for wrongful convictions to be corrected, during which time defendants and their families often suffer irreparable physical, psychological and social harm,” he said.
Koji Tabuchi, a professor of criminal law at Kyushu University in Fukuoka, said it’s time for prosecutors to abandon their zero-sum thinking when individual freedom is at stake.
“When a judge in Japan acquits a defendant, prosecutors think, ‘We lose,'” he says. “But should they think that way?”
Those waiting for justice in prison are not getting any younger, says another expert on Japanese criminal law.
“Many of the defendants requesting a retrial are very old and don’t really have time left,” said Kana Sasakura, a law professor at Konan University in western Kobe.
Ryota Ishikawa, a lawyer who has been fighting Sakahara’s case for 20 years, says the decision to grant a retrial came too late.
“As defense attorneys, we are deeply disappointed. There is a fundamental injustice in the entire system. We are frustrated that we were not able to celebrate with the defendant,” he said.
For Kouji, change cannot come quickly. Years of fighting for justice for his father have burdened him with guilt and regret.
“If he had been granted a retrial while he was still alive, he would still be here,” he said of his father.
“I sincerely hope that Japan will bring its legal system in line with other countries as soon as possible so that the victims of wrongful convictions will no longer have to suffer.”
