The Supreme Public Prosecutors Office and the National Police Agency on April 1 made public the results of their separate internal reviews of the investigations that led to the wrongful conviction of Mr. Toshikazu Sugaya. Mr. Sugaya served 17 1/2 years of a life sentence for the May 1990 murder of a 4-year-old girl in Ashikaga, Tochigi Prefecture. He was acquitted March 26 in a retrial in the Utsunomiya District Court, mainly on the strength of a new DNA test.
Both the SPPO and the NPA said a key factor was the investigators' misplaced confidence in the original DNA test, which was later shown to be flawed. The NPA said that questioning of Mr. Sugaya was based on the false assumption that he was undoubtedly the culprit.
Both bodies were guilty of appalling neglect of fundamental facts. Nobody had seen Mr. Sugaya at the pachinko parlor from where the girl disappeared. Footprints left at the crime scene did not match any of Mr. Sugaya's shoes. The girl's fingerprints were not found on a bicycle which, in a confession, he said he used in her abduction. Two people reported seeing a man walking with a young girl on the day of the murder near where her body was found, but investigators paid insufficient attention to scrutinizing these accounts. Both reports said that Mr. Sugaya's confessions were inconsistent with the actual condition of the girl's corpse and the crime scene, and did not contain "exposure of secrets" that only the true culprit could know.