Osaka Rape Case

An older man (60+) who was wrongfully accused by a young woman who later recanted lost his bid for redress from the state.

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Man wrongly imprisoned for rape fails in bid to get redress

By SATOKO ONUKI/ Staff Writer

http://www.asahi.com/ajw/articles/AJ201901090063.html

Asahi Shinbun January 9, 2019


The disappointed plaintiff at a news conference in Osaka on Jan. 8 (Chinami Tajika)

OSAKA--A 75-year-old man who spent more than six years in prison before being acquitted of rape and other charges in a retrial failed in his bid Jan. 8 to win redress from the state for the wrongs he suffered.

In his suit before the Osaka District Court, the plaintiff, along with his wife, had sought 140 million yen ($1.3 million) in compensation from the state and Osaka Prefecture.

The man said he plans to appeal the case to a high court.

“The court is not reflecting on (its past decision) at all. I can’t accept it,” he told a news conference after the ruling.

The man received about 28 million yen in compensation under the Criminal Compensation Law after his innocence was established in the retrial.

But the man said that the sum of money could never address the anguish he had suffered.

“As I was stigmatized, I lost many friends and my job. It’s impossible to return to my former life,” he said.

The man was indicted on charges of raping a teenaged girl at his home in 2004 and again in 2008. He was handed a 12-year prison term by the district court in 2009. The sentence was later finalized by the Supreme Court.

While he was in prison, the girl confessed that she had made the story up.

In the investigation that followed, it emerged that the medical institution that examined the girl after she had claimed she had been raped had no record that stated there was any evidence she had been subjected to sexual violence.

In light of that, the man was released from prison in November 2014, more than six years after he was arrested. He was acquitted in a retrial in October 2015, and filed his lawsuit seeking compensation a year after that.

The Jan. 8 ruling noted that if the Osaka prefectural police or the Osaka District Public Prosecutors Office had bothered to contact the medical institution in the first place, officials might have stumbled on the truth and shaken the girl's testimony.

However, it concluded that those in charge of the investigation were not negligent.

The ruling also referred to a district court judge who, the 75-year-old plaintiff asserted, handed down the initial verdict based on the assumption that a woman, or in this case a girl, would not lie about such a matter and to a high court judge who, on appeal, rejected a request by defense lawyers to question members of the medical institution as witnesses.

With regard to those judges, the ruling said that their actions cannot be deemed to be illegal in light of an earlier Supreme Court ruling stating that judges must take responsibility for false rulings only when they preside over trials for unfair and illegal purposes.