Prosecutors said Friday they will seek an acquittal if a retrial is held for a 62-year-old man released Thursday after a fresh DNA test did not link him to the 1990 kidnap-murder of a 4-year-old girl.
With the extremely rare step, Toshikazu Sugaya, who had been sentenced to life for kidnapping and strangling Mami Matsuda in Ashikaga, Tochigi Prefecture, is now expected to be cleared in a retrial before year's end, legal experts said.
The prosecutors are believed to have judged that they lack sufficient evidence to challenge the results of the recent DNA analysis, which undermined the credibility of earlier DNA tests that had led to Sugaya's conviction.