This is sort of picking up again on a thread from two years ago
http://tinyurl.com/iv8f

In that thread, Scott made mention of Hirasawa Sadamichi, the man
sentenced to death for January 1948's infamous Teigin Jiken, in which
someone entered the Shiina-machi branch of the Teikoku Bank just after
3 p.m. and managed to dupe the entire staff into taking poison. Twelve
died and four survived.

Hirasawa spent 39 years in prison for that crime, almost all of it on
death row, eventually passing away in a prison hospital at the ripe
and decrepit age of 95.

One of the unique things about this case is that it isn't just some
murder from the musty past....the defense team is to this day still
hammering away trying to get a retrial.

I had heard passing mention of this case in several places, and
gradually developed an interest in hearing/reading about the
particulars of it. So recently I hunted around on Amazon Japan and
came up with 帝銀事件の全貌と平沢貞通 http://tinyurl.com/iv8v , which
I have been reading for the past few days.

There are some rather amazing things about this case.

Prior to the Teigin poisonings, a person believed to be the same man
attempted something similar at two different banks. In neither case
was anyone harmed. Hirasawa was charged with crimes in all three
cases. Care to guess how many pieces of physical evidence the
prosecution had which connected Hirasawa to *any* of the three crime
scenes? Capital Z Capital E Capital R Capital O.

From the two earlier attempts (or practice runs, as some think them to
have been) and from the Teigin case, there were a total of 50
eyewitnesses who saw the perpetrator. The breakdown of their
testimony:

        That's him!                             4
        He resembles the guy                   14
        I can't be sure                        22
        There's something different             7
        That ain't him                          1
        I don't know                            2

Hardly the world's most damning identification of a perpetrator. In
fact, when the police initially brought Hirasawa in, they had 11 of
the eyewitnesses come down to the police station to identify him. He
wasn't placed in a lineup so people had to pick him out, the
eyewitnesses saw him all by himself. Results? Six of the eleven said
"That's not him". The other five said "He resembles him". Apparently
lots of guys in Tokyo resembled the murderer, because the Tokyo police
investigated 8,750 men who resembled a montage created by a police
artist.

Scott made mention of a coerced confession. While coerced confessions
aren't uncommon in Japan, the police/prosecutors have another trick up
their sleeves...the outright forgery of confessions. Isobe Tsuneharu,
a MoJ lawyer tasked with being a sort of human rights advocate within
the MoJ, in September 1955 received a request from Hirasawa to examine
his case. Isobe's initial reaction was that since three judges at the
local court and three judges at the appeals court and fifteen judges
at the supreme court had all found him guilty and sentenced him to
death, then it was pretty damned obvious that he must have committed
the crime. But Isobe went down to waded through an ocean of court
records on the matter anyway.

He noticed something very interesting about the confessions the
prosecutor went to court with. There were three confessions,
supposedly obtained on two consecutive days while interrogating
Hirasawa at the Tokyo Detention Facility, where he was being held.
Isobe noticed that the signatures on the confessions looked so
amazingly identical that it were as though someone had pressed down
really hard while writing on a stack of papers and then used the
indentations on the underlying sheets as a guide for filling in a new
signature. He believed both signatures to be forgeries, but even if
they weren't he found it hard to believe that a person could write his
signature precisely the same on two different days.

The *most* interesting thing he noticed about the confessions, though,
was the fingerprints on them. Not the latent prints, but the kind they
ink a finger and have the suspect place his fingerprint on the paper
as a sort of proof.

Isobe noticed that in the inked fingerprints on *all* of the
confessions there were visible two small, white, overlapping circles.
And he noticed that the two circles were in precisely the same place
on the fingerprints from both days. And that in other regards the
fingerprints appeared identical on the page. 

Isobe sent copies of the confessions to the Forensic Science lab at
Osaka City University and asked to have them analyzed. At the same
time, he sent an inquiry to the head of the Tokyo Detention Center
inquiring if Hirasawa had been interrogated on the dates of the
confessions.

In January 1959, Isobe received the results:

1. There is a very strong possibility that the signatures are
forgeries

2. The fingerprints are Hirasawa's, but all the prints appear
identical in every way. The two overlapping white rings weren't caused
by Hirasawa's finger, but are the result of the finger failing to pick
up ink because of corresponding indentations in the ink (they used the
same pasty stuff used for hanko). The lab took close-up photos of the
prints and then sandwiched the negatives together. The result? It
looked like a single photo.
It is impossible to imagine that the rings would appear at precisely
the same position in the fingerprint from inkings done on two
different days. But it is possible that the prints would appear the
same if they were all taken from a single inking.

Further, he received official word from the head of the Tokyo
Detention Center that no one had been in to interrogate Hirasawa on
the days the confessions were dated.

Isobe ended up resigning from the MoJ and joining Hirasawa's defense
team.

All this (and more), and I'm only on Chapter 3.

Hirasawa got royally fucking railroaded.





--

Michael Cash



"There was a time, Mr. Cash, when I believed you must be the most useless
thing in the world. But that was before I read a Microsoft help file."

                                Prof. Ernest T. Bass
                                Mount Pilot College


http://www.sunfield.ne.jp/~mike/