About two months have passed since the Tokyo High Court decided to retry Mr. Toshikazu Sugaya, who served 17 years of a life sentence until a new DNA test suggested that he was innocent. But the date of the retrial has not yet been set because the defense counsel, the prosecution and the Utsunomiya District Court — the venue of the retrial — disagree on how the retrial should be held.

Mr. Sugaya was arrested in December 1991 in the May 1990 murder of a 4-year-old girl in Ashikaga, Tochigi Prefecture. Although he retracted earlier confessions of guilt toward the end of his first trial, the Utsunomiya court sentenced him to life imprisonment in July 1993 on the basis of DNA test results. The Tokyo High Court recommended a new DNA test in December 2008 and decided to retry him on the basis of the test results.

The prosecution does not plan to try to prove the guilt of Mr. Sugaya because it wants to close the case as soon as possible. But the defense counsel believes the retrial should be used to find out why the false charge was made. This is reasonable.

Lawyers for the defense demand that a forensic expert of the National Police Agency who conducted the original DNA test, third-party experts on DNA tests, and investigators of the Tochigi prefectural police testify in the retrial.

Recently it surfaced that the Utsunomiya District Public Prosecutors Office and the Tochigi prefectural police possess separate recorded tapes of confessions that Mr. Sugaya made in connection with two other cases involving the disappearance and murder of girls. No indictments have been issued in a August 1979 case or in a November 1984 case, both in Ashikaga. In the latter case, the body was found in March 1986.

It is believed that the tapes reveal the process in which Mr. Sugaya first admitted guilt but later retracted his confessions. If people concerned testify and the recordings are examined at retrial, the information gathered will go a long way toward preventing false charges in the future. Understanding how and why Mr. Sugaya was indicted is especially important now since most Japanese citizens may serve as lay judges at some point.