The Supreme Court ordered the Hiroshima High Court on Friday to retry a case involving a Peruvian man sentenced to life for sexually assaulting and murdering a 7-year-old girl in the city of Hiroshima in 2005, finding fault with the pretrial proceedings and subsequent ruling.
Jose Manuel Torres Yagi, 37, was initially sentenced to life by the Hiroshima District Court.
Acting on appeals from both the defendant, seeking leniency, and prosecutors, seeking the death penalty, the high court sent the case back to the district court last December, saying deliberations there were not sufficient, given flaws in pretrial procedures adopted to speed up criminal trials ahead of the introduction of the lay judge system earlier this year.
The district court spent two months on pretrial proceedings and five consecutive days on intensive deliberations, issuing its sentence only around 50 days after the first trial session, using the new procedures introduced to produce speedy rulings.
But the high court questioned the accelerated process.
The defense appealed the high court ruling to the top court.
During the high court retrial, the focus will be on if the defendant is sentenced to hang.