A high court ruling that acquitted a 60-year-old man in a high-profile retrial over a 1986 murder of a 15-year-old junior high school girl in the city of Fukui was finalized on Friday — 38 years after he was arrested.
Prosecutors said they decided not to file an appeal against the Nagoya High Court's branch in Kanazawa, Ishikawa Prefecture, that handed down the ruling last month on Shoshi Maekawa.
"We are not thinking about apologizing (to Maekawa), but we take it seriously that he had been serving a sentence for a considerable amount of time," said Katsuhiko Hama, deputy chief prosecutor of the Nagoya High Public Prosecutor's Office, in a news conference.
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