The second hearing in the prosecution's appeal of a Nepalese man's acquittal of robbery and murder by a district court was held Thursday, after the Tokyo High Court on Wednesday designated two of his five defense lawyers as court-appointed attorneys.
The remaining three lawyers attended the session with the defense team as "private hires" and will work without pay, they said.
Govinda Prasad Mainali's defense team, who represented the Nepalese man without pay during trial hearings at the Tokyo District Court, had filed a demand with the court that at least one of them be paid from the national coffers.
Taxpayers' money is used to hire court-appointed lawyers for defendants who have no financial resources to hire private lawyers.
In April, Mainali, 33, was acquitted of murdering and stealing money from a female employee of Tokyo Electric Power Co. in 1997.
Prosecutors claimed Thursday that the Tokyo District Court that acquitted Mainali misjudged the evidence and handed down the wrong decision.
However, Mainali's defense team responded that the prosecutors had failed to eliminate reasonable doubt, claiming that the high court should dismiss the case immediately.
The district court said it saw no evidence that directly linked the murder to Mainali, a former restaurant employee, and that they could not deny the possibility that someone else could have been at the scene of the crime at the time the woman was killed.
Mainali was released from custody but immediately handed over to immigration authorities for overstaying his visa and was awaiting deportation. Mainali arrived in Japan in 1994 on a tourist visa.