Japanese court overturns convictions after 29 years

May 24, 2011, 9:00 GMT

Tokyo - A Japanese district court overturned the convictions of two men in a 1967 murder-robbery after they spent nearly three decades in prison.

Shoji Sakurai and Takao Sugiyama, both 64, were found not guilty in their retrial in the killing and robbery of Shoten Tamamura at his home in Tone, Ibaraki prefecture.

Daisuke Kanda, presiding judge at the Tsuchiura branch of the Mito District Court, said in the decision that there was no objective evidence to link the defendants to the crime.

The two were arrested in October 1967, indicted in December and sentenced to life imprisonment in 1970, based mainly on their confessions made during police interrogation and accounts from witnesses near the crime scene.

The two men had pleaded not guilty during the original trial, saying police investigators had forced them to confess.

They were released on parole in 1996.

It was the seventh case in postwar Japan involving the acquittal in a retrial of defendants previously sentenced to death or life imprisonment.