and Takao Sugiyama hold a news conference in Tokyo on Tuesday. KYODO PHOTO
With the unanimous decision by the four justices of the top court's Second Petty Bench, Shoji Sakurai, 62, and Takao Sugiyama, 63, are likely to be acquitted of murdering 62-year-old carpenter Shoten Tamamura and robbing him of ¥107,000 in the town of Tone, Ibaraki Prefecture.
The life sentences were finalized in 1978 and the two men were released on parole in 1996.
The incident has come to be known as the "Fukawa case" after the name of the district in the town where Tamamura was killed.
It will be the seventh retrial of postwar criminal cases in which defendants faced finalized death sentences or life imprisonment, according to the Japan Federation of Bar Associations.
In the sixth case, a man was released earlier this year after being convicted of murdering a young girl in Ashikaga, Tochigi Prefecture, in 1990 and the case is currently being retried. Defendants were acquitted in all five of the other cases.
Accepting Sakurai and Sugiyama's second petition for a retrial, the Mito District Court decided to reopen the case in 2005, saying the accounts given by the two men were inconsistent with the evidence at the crime scene.
Lawyers for both men submitted several pieces of "new evidence" in the petition, including a test result on the method of the murder.
The prosecutors filed an appeal against the decision, but the Tokyo High Court rejected it in 2008, saying there was "serious doubt" about the credibility of the men's confessions, which they had repeatedly changed, and eyewitness testimony was inconclusive.
Tamamura was strangled to death and found inside his home Aug. 30, 1967. The two men were arrested the following October.