The Supreme Court on March 14 dismissed, on the strength of a legal technicality, a request to retry five deceased journalists convicted of promoting communism during the Pacific War years. The five had been convicted in the "Yokohama Incident," regarded as the worst case of free-speech suppression during the war. The five had maintained that they were framed and that torture was used to force their confessions. The Yokohama District Court decided on a retrial in 2003, 19 years after the first request for a retrial. The top court's decision crushed relatives' hopes of clearing the names of the five as it failed to clarify whether the former defendants were guilty or innocent.
Between 1942 and the closing days of the war, the tokkou (Special Higher Police) of Kanagawa Prefecture, having invoked the notorious 1925 Peace Preservation Law, arrested some 60 people, most of them journalists. Four were tortured to death in detention and one died immediately after being released on probation. In August and September 1945, the Yokohama District Court gave the five and 20 others suspended sentences of two years' imprisonment. Only one hearing was held for most defendants. The anticommunist law was abolished on Oct. 15, 1945, and those convicted were granted amnesty.
New evidence for a retrial had been submitted comprising documentation of the 1952 conviction of three former police investigators accused of torturing suspects in the Yokohama Incident plus a statement submitted by the five and other former defendants when they filed a complaint against the police officers.