The Supreme Court on Tuesday reversed a lower court ruling that newspapers should not be held responsible for publishing defamatory wire reports, and returned the cases to the Tokyo High Court.
The top court said newspapers cannot be excluded from responsibility in reporting on criminal cases by claiming they just ran what was in a news agency report.
The Supreme Court decision was on 19 libel suits filed against Kyodo News and its member newspapers by Kazuyoshi Miura, who is free pending the state's appeal of his acquittal on charges of murdering his wife, who died in Japan a year after being gunned down in Los Angeles in 1981.