Japan pays $1mn to innocent jailed for 17 years

Jan 13, 2011 |

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Tokyo: A Japanese court on Thursday awarded $1.1 million, the maximum possible compensation, to a 64-year-old man who spent 17 years in jail after being wrongly convicted of a child's murder.

The district court in Utsunomiya, north of Tokyo, awarded 92 million yen ($1.1 million) to Toshikazu Sugaya for his suffering and to cover his legal costs in the case, a court official said.

Sugaya was convicted partly because of DNA evidence which was subsequently found to be flawed.

The compensation of 12,500 yen per day in jail is the highest amount allowed under Japanese law in such a case, the official said.

"One chapter was closed today," Sugaya, a former kindergarten bus driver for who was freed in 2009, said.

"But the detectives and prosecutors who interrogated me have not apologised yet. I want them to apologise. There is no statute of limitations for me... I want the real perpetrator to be caught no matter what."

Sugaya was arrested in December 1991 over the kidnap of a four-year-old girl from a game parlour in Ashikaga, north of Tokyo, in May 1990. The girl's body was found in a nearby river bed the next day.

The bus driver was convicted and received a life term in 1993, a sentence last upheld in 2000, in part because an initial DNA test was found to have detected his bodily fluids on the dead girl's underwear.

Sugaya's lawyers had demanded another DNA test, arguing that the forensic tests were unreliable in the early 1990s, and the Tokyo High Court ordered the second set of the genetic tests in December 2008.

Separate tests conducted on behalf of both prosecutors and defence lawyers then showed the sampled DNA did not match Sugaya's.

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