When the Toyama Prefectural Police announced in January they had found the real culprit in two rape cases in 2002 — for which 40-year-old Hiroshi Yanagihara had already been convicted and served time — it was no surprise to legal experts.
"I don't mean to exaggerate, but we do run into cases where clients had confessed to something they didn't do," said Osaka lawyer Hisashi Kosakai, a strong advocate of videotaping interrogations.
Experts say false convictions originate from forced confessions made behind closed doors, as was the case with Yanagihara, who was acquitted Wednesday in a retrial. In 2002, he was wrongfully arrested, indicted and sentenced to three years in prison. In the end he languished behind bars more than two years before he was paroled in January 2005.