Japan's top court on Friday acquitted a Vietnamese former trainee of abandoning her stillborn twins, overturning lower court rulings that sentenced her to a suspended prison term, in its first judgment on a case regarding abandonment of a stillborn baby.
The Supreme Court's Second Petty Bench decided on whether the acts committed by Le Thi Thuy Linh, 24, amounted to the crime of corpse abandonment. She placed the bodies in a cardboard box and left them on a shelf in her room for around 33 hours, along with a letter of apology.
Linh claimed that she had planned to hold a funeral for them but had not known what to do given the severity of the situation. She also said she had not revealed to anyone that she was pregnant for fear of being deported.