Lawyers handed the Tokyo High Court a final report Monday to conclude their 19th campaign to seek a retrial to clear the name of a painter convicted in the famous Teigin Incident slayings.
Sadamichi Hirasawa was found guilty of the 12 fatal poisonings and spent more than 30 years on death row before dying in a prison hospital in 1987 at age 95.
Monday also marked the 56th anniversary of the killings, in which a robber passing himself off as a public health official told 16 clerks and customers at a Teikoku Ginko bank branch in Tokyo that dysentery had broken out in the neighborhood.