Mainichi Shimbun   

JAPAN: Death row inmate loses appeal over forced confession

An elderly man will remain on death row after the Tokyo High Court on Wednesday dismissed his appeal, ruling that a confession he gave to a 1988 double murder was unreliable but his guilt could be proved from other evidence.

 Kazutoshi Takahashi was seeking to have a September 1995 murder conviction quashed, arguing that the confession to the double slaying had been beaten out of him by investigators.

 But Presiding Judge Takeo Nakanishi ruled the death sentence the Yokohama District Court gave him just over 7 years ago was valid.

 "The confession where you described how you killed the victims contained false information, which was apparently squeezed out of you by interrogators," Nakanishi acknowledged. "However, it is reasonable to conclude through other evidence that you killed them."

 Defense lawyers argued that the confession to the murder was forced out of 68-year-old Takahashi by investigators who screamed out at him and bashed him. They admitted he was guilty of stealing 12 million yen in cash, but denied he was responsible for killing Yun In-hyeon, a 65-year-old Yokohama loanshark, and his 60-year-old common-law wife Hatsuko Kobayashi.

 But Nakanishi pointed to the initial district court ruling that sent Takahashi away. It said that there had been some force involved in extracting Takahashi's confession, but not enough to make his statements unreliable in a court of law. The Yokohama ruling also stated that Takahashi's claims that Yun and Kobayashi were already dead when he went to ask them for a loan was an "unnatural coincidence." Instead, the prosecution in the earlier case argued that the likelihood that Takahashi had committed murder was extremely high. It was a viewpoint the Tokyo High Court maintained on Wednesday.

 Court records showed that Takahashi fatally bludgeoned and stabbed the couple with a crowbar and a screwdriver in the financier's Yokohama office in June 1988. Takahashi then stole 12 million yen in cash.

 Takahashi's defense team vowed to take the case to the Supreme Court.

 "The judges, who dismissed the credibility of the confession, handed him the death penalty because he is 'suspicious.' This absurd ruling casts strong doubts about the validity of capital punishment," a spokesman for the defense team said after announcing that they would appeal the high court ruling.