The Osaka District Court granted a retrial Wednesday for the mother of an 11-year-old girl and the woman's common-law husband who were sentenced to life for the child's murder in Osaka in 1995.
Questioning the credibility of the couple's confessions during the investigation, presiding Judge Kazuo Mizushima granted the retrial on the grounds that their statements were "unnatural" and "unreasonable from a scientific standpoint" when considering the results of an experiment by the defense counsel to simulate the fire.
Keiko Aoki, 48, and her common-law husband, Tatsuhiro Boku, 46, pleaded not guilty in court, though at one point they had admitted the allegations when grilled by police and prosecutors.