A district court on Thursday ordered the Shiga Prefectural Government to pay about ¥31 million ($208,728) in damages to a former assistant nurse acquitted of murdering a patient.
Sosuke Ikeda, presiding judge at the Otsu District Court, said in the ruling that the investigation of Mika Nishiyama, 45, by officers of the Shiga Prefectural Police department went beyond socially acceptable levels.
Meanwhile, the court rejected Nishiyama's claim for damages from the Japanese government, saying her indictment by public prosecutors was reasonable to a certain degree. The plaintiff side plans to appeal against the ruling.
Police arrested Nishiyama in 2004 on suspicion of murdering a male patient at Koto Memorial Hospital in the city of Higashiomi, formerly the town of Koto, in Shiga Prefecture based on her confession during police investigations.
She retracted her confession and pleaded not guilty during her trial, but the Supreme Court finalized a 12-year prison sentence in 2007.
After Nishiyama finished her prison term, a retrial was granted to her as a high court acknowledged that there were suspicions over the credibility of her confession. The high court's decision was endorsed by the Supreme Court, and her acquittal was finalized in the retrial in April 2020.
She sued the central and prefectural governments for damages totaling some ¥54 million in December the same year.
The plaintiff side argued that the police officers who were in charge of investigating Nishiyama led her intentionally to make a false confession by abusing her easily swayed character. It said that the police deliberately concealed evidence by not sending to prosecutors an investigation report suggesting the possibility of the male patient having died naturally.
Nishiyama's side also said it was illegal for prosecutors to have indicted her without fully examining evidence such as the cause of the patient's death.
The defense side rebutted by saying that necessary investigations were conducted based on reasonable grounds. It called for the dismissal of her retrial plea, saying there was nothing illegal in the law-enforcement authorities' investigations.
"We will consider our response after examining the ruling in detail," said Makoto Kibayashi, chief of the inspection office of the prefectural police.
"As we see it, we think that the central government's claim was basically accepted," said Hiroharu Nakayama, deputy chief prosecutor at the Otsu District Public Prosecutors Office.
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