Obara Trial Resumes

[TFG]

I thought the same thing. Why are they publishing these 1970s images of the man in sun glasses?

The influence of money in the family and links to the LDP, probably!:-|

[Captain Japan]

I thought the same thing. Why are they publishing these 1970s images of the man in sun glasses?

I know this isn't what you meant but it is different...

In this courtroom sketch Japanese real estate developer Joji Obara is seen in a courtroom of the Tokyo District Court in Tokyo on Tuesday April 24, 2007. A Tokyo court acquitted a Japanese real estate developer on Tuesday in the death and dismemberment of a British bar hostess, but sentenced him to life over a series of rapes, a court official said. Joji Obara, 54, was arrested in 2001 on charges of rape resulting in the death of the Briton, Lucie Blackman. He was also on trial over nine other rapes, including that of the Australian, Carita Ridgway, who died after a 1992 attack. (AP Photo/Kyodo News, Tennen Katsuyama)

[amdg]

?????
I wasn't following this very closely, but what is this? He was sentenced for crimes going back as far as 15 or 20 years. Why were they waiting until now to charge him with those earlier crimes? I don't get it.

[Mulboyne]

?????
I wasn't following this very closely, but what is this? He was sentenced for crimes going back as far as 15 or 20 years. Why were they waiting until now to charge him with those earlier crimes? I don't get it.

When he was arrested as a suspect in the Blackman murder, police found videos linking him to the other crimes. Witnesses also came forward to testify against him. On top of that, the police took another look at complaints against Obara that they had previously decided not to follow up.

[eddie]

i understand that going forward he'll be looking for the 'real killers'.

of course he could do a more thorough job if he were freed...

[Big Booger]

I know this isn't what you meant but it is different...

In this courtroom sketch Japanese real estate developer Joji Obara is seen in a courtroom of the Tokyo District Court in Tokyo on Tuesday April 24, 2007. A Tokyo court acquitted a Japanese real estate developer on Tuesday in the death and dismemberment of a British bar hostess, but sentenced him to life over a series of rapes, a court official said. Joji Obara, 54, was arrested in 2001 on charges of rape resulting in the death of the Briton, Lucie Blackman. He was also on trial over nine other rapes, including that of the Australian, Carita Ridgway, who died after a 1992 attack. (AP Photo/Kyodo News, Tennen Katsuyama)

Are those the same sunglasses? LOL

[Takechanpoo]

and needless to say, he is zainichi kimuchi.

[Mulboyne]

Carita Ridgway's family have made a statement following the verdict:

Brisbane Times: Anger over hostess deaths in Japan

The family of an Australian woman who was murdered in Japan is calling for an independent inquiry into the death of a Briton who also worked as a hostess. In one of Japan's most horrendous sex crime cases, Joji Obara was sentenced to life in jail on Tuesday for raping eight women and for drugging, raping and slaying Carita Ridgway, a 21-year-old Australian hostess who died in hospital in 1992...It was not until police investigated Blackman's death that they found that Ridgway's death from liver failure in 1992 was due to her being drugged with chloroform by Obara, who then filmed himself raping the senseless woman.

"Carita's family feel a deep sense of anger, betrayal and disappointment in relation to the 1992 police investigation into Carita's death," Ridgway's mother Annette Foster said after the verdict. "The fact that Obara went on to continue committing crimes for the next eight years forced on Carita's family great stress, particularly in respect to Lucie Blackman. "Carita's family respectfully request the Japanese government to set up an independent inquiry into the 1992 police investigation of Carita's death," she said...

...Some Japanese media have criticised police and prosecutors for a sloppy investigation and noted that a man suspected of killing Briton Lindsay Hawker in March was still on the run. The man fled the apartment near Tokyo where police found the 22-year-old English teacher's body in a sand-filled bathtub. "It would not be an exaggeration to say that the true worth of Japan's police is being called into question," said an editorial in the conservative Sankei newspaper. Legal experts, however, faulted a legal system that has long relied on confessions by defendants or testimony of accomplices and eyewitnesses to prove guilt in criminal cases.

"In Japan, the requirements for proof are very strict so the verdict was not so unexpected," said Hiroshi Itakura, a criminal law professor at Nihon University's Law School. "But I think if the judge had made an overall assessment based on other evidence, Obara could have been found guilty." Former prosecutor Tsuchimoto agreed. "In the past, many cases relied on confessions ... But even a child could find a defendant guilty if there is a confession," he said. "The era of relying on confessions alone is over."

Experts said it could take another 18 months or so before a final verdict was reached if the case went to the Supreme Court after passing through the Tokyo High Court.

[succubusqueen]

How about the post morten study done on Carita Ridgeway liver. It wasnt until the Lucie Blackman murder that the pathologist decided to analyze the liver. At least it was still preserved somewhere in the hospital . Comes to show that "C.S.I. Tokyo" and forensics pretty much sucks!..

[Daz McMullan]

I'm really surprised at the verdict.

There's a great book called 'The Japanese way of Justice" by David Johnson that anyone seeking to comment on this case should read. Also, 'Dear Judge Ichiro' is a fictionalised account of a murdered Brit expat in Tokyo from a kind of legal/anthropological view.

[Mulboyne]

I'm really surprised at the verdict.

Some Japanese press coverage I read beforehand seemed to be leaning towards this particular verdict as a strong possibility, primarily because of the circumstantial nature of the evidence and the lack of a confession. The police probably expected they would get a confession and were likely bamboozled when Obara refused to crack. The comment above that "The era of relying on confessions alone is over" sounds good but most FGs will probably recall the case of Wakayama curry poisoner Masumi Hayashi. She didn't confess and the evidence in that case appeared to me to be largely circumstantial but she was convicted. We've gone over before on this forum the case of the Nepalese man convicted on a prosecutor's appeal of the murder of a Japanese prostitute and the evidence there also appeared to be circumstantial.

I don't know the details of those cases in sufficient detail to know whether I've characterized them correctly but I'd be interested to know of another case in Japan, particularly a high profile case, where a suspect was acquitted of a murder charge because the evidence presented by the prosecutor was deemed circumstantial.

I wonder whether the judge in this case was inclined to give Obara the benefit of the doubt because he was prepared to find him guilty on other charges. In the other two cases I mentioned, there were no other charges which may have influenced the judges not to be lenient.

[Mulboyne]

Asia Times: Blood money - A tragedy in Japan

..."You can say the money had no bearing on the verdict," said a Japanese in Britain following the case in the Japanese media, "but nobody's really going to believe it." Who, indeed, could possibly believe it, especially when Blackman obliged with a written statement for the defense saying he had not known "that the cause of death of my daughter Lucie Blackman was unknown" and "the DNA or so on of defendant Obara were not detected from the body of my daughter at all"? And that wasn't all. He had not even known, he said in the statement, that "the defendant Obara lodged at the Japanese-style hotel on the day and at the time supposed when my daughter would have been dismembered and deserted".

Oh, that's right, Blackman might say, but he knew the prosecution would immediately ask the judge to exclude the statement from consideration, and of course the judge would agree - exactly as happened. What Blackman, in his ignorance of how the system works in Japan, had not quite imagined was that the judge would let Obara off for lack of evidence while claiming the money had nothing to do with the verdict..."Who can believe such nonsense?" asked the Japanese analyst working in London, as the recriminations and denunciations were reverberating through the headlines here. "Nobody Japanese would accept money in such a case"...

...The critical difference between the Ridgway and Blackman cases is that Ridgway's family in Australia, when offered blood money, turned it down. Both cases, though, raise the question of how interested the Japanese police are in pursuing those suspected of abusing - whether raping or injuring or killing - foreign hostesses whom Japanese universally view as prostitutes. The fact that these women may claim merely to have earned money by according wealthy Japanese the privilege of being seen wining and dining them hardly exonerates them, in the Japanese view. The assumption is they're available for just about anything, for a price, and no amount of denials, true or false, is going to clear them of that stigma...The other underlying question is whether a Japanese judge would have let Obara off if Blackman had been Japanese.

Anyone who has covered court cases in Japan knows that the prosecution wins virtually all its cases in Japan. There is no such thing as a jury trial, and judges assume prosecutors would not bring a case to trial if they hadn't gotten all the facts and gotten them right. "Japanese prosecutors are quite precise," said a Japanese legal expert. "They get ready 100%. That's why cases take so long before the trial begins"...The judge could rationalize the evidence as unconvincing and circumstantial as the body was badly decomposed and there was no blood trail to link it to Obara. At trials in Japan, though, such fine points are typically not enough to get the accused off the hook if the prosecution is convinced of guilt...more...

[TFG]

Is the judge of this case a distant Obara family member and if not, how much did he get from Obara for his decision?:D

[amdg]

In my opinion, the offering of money should itself be veiwed as an admission of guilt and it should be a major part of the prosecution's case against him. I don't really understand why it's not viewed that way in Japan. After all, if you're accused of a crime you didn't commit, it's your name that's being dragged through the mud, and your life that is on the line for no reason. A guiltless person would never offer money in such a situation and if I was ever falsely accused of murder I would never offer money to the victim's family, because to do so is just like saying "I'm sorry (for what I did)".

However, whether or not the family accepts the money should be completely irrelevant to the court. The fact that they accept or do not accept the money should have no bearing on the handing out of justice for a crime of murder. To say otherwise is to say that Japan operates under a system of laws where it is OK to kill a person for a particular price.

I hope people stop focusing on the father's acceptance of money in this case. Hell, maybe he needed the money but expected that justice would be done whether he took it or not. If that's the case then I think he was just being pragmatic in a difficult situation.

[Mulboyne]

The Japan Times today reprints an interview with Tim Blackman from last weekend's Observer. Here's the original link and a lengthy excerpt:

Why I took '100 million pieces of silver' for my daughter's death

...Japanese justice is slow, but, says Tim, the delays have a purpose: they make the accused reflect on their crimes and admit their errors.

'The Japanese honour system requires that they atone, or they will bring dishonour on their family. Part of that atonement can be a payment to the victim or victim's family. If it is part of genuinely voiced contrition, then that may be taken into consideration by the judge when passing sentence.'

Tim was told by the police that he would probably receive a call from a friend or relative of Obara, offering him money as part of the condolence process. Sure enough, in November 2005 he was shopping in Newport, Isle of Wight, when his mobile rang. A thin voice at the other end said in broken English that he was representing the Obara defence team and wanted to discuss the possibility of making what he called an 'atonement payment'.

'I rejected the whole idea at the time, and referred it to the police, both in Japan and London. I had a discussion with the Tokyo Metropolitan Police. They said for someone denying the charges, we don't understand this. If he is not admitting any guilt, then no payments can qualify.' In the event, Obara made 'condolence payments' to most of his victims. It was, said Tim, an indication of the truly bizarre nature of the man; his unreliable, implausible evidence, his wild interjections in court, and his assurance that he could talk his way out of the case. At one point, he sacked his entire legal team, apparently on a whim.

So what made Tim change his mind last September and accept 100 million yen before the verdict? This made his ex-wife, Jane, who separated from Tim 12 years ago, furious. 'He is conducting these negotiations against my wishes and the pleas of his children. Lucie's loyal family and friends are sickened by Tim Blackman's utter betrayal,' she said at a press conference. Last week she described it as 'blood money' and '100 million pieces of silver', adding: 'Judas was content with just 30'.

'Principally, I wanted to secure the long-term future of the Lucie Blackman Trust,' said Tim, referring to the trust which works to help young people be more aware of their safety, particularly when abroad. It launches a special text message service next month.

'Nothing I do is going to change what happened. Nothing will bring Lucie back. My responsibility now is for the living. At the time I was very anxious about Sophie [who made a suicide attempt and has been in psychiatric care], for my son Rupert and for the wider Blackman family, who have suffered terribly throughout all this.

'I personally have lost the past seven years, devoting so much time, energy and emotion in the case. I need to repair my own life as well as those around me.

'But I knew I would get slated, I knew my ex-wife would hate me if I accepted the money. I spoke to my dear dad about it and he said, "You don't know what might happen. You may come out of this with nothing."'

But what of the statement he was required to sign before the money was paid? Phrased in fractured English, it calls into question the cause of death: 'Hereinbefore and as father of Lucie Blackman I would like you please inspect the most important these three points supposed to be able to clarify the cause of death and this case.'

'To me, it was a meaningless piece of paper,' Tim said. 'The body was so decomposed none of us knew the cause of death for certain. I knew the defence would try to introduce this in the case, and sure enough they did. The judge immediately threw it out as inadmissible.'

At the same time, he sent a letter to the prosecution: 'I believe the defendant to be guilty of all charges. I do not forgive the defendant in any way whatsoever. The condolence from his friend is accepted just as we have received condolence from around the world.'

When last week Judge Tsutomu Tochgi finally sentenced Obara to life imprisonment for his assaults on the nine other women, he said of the payments, 'there is a limit to how far one can take such matters into consideration' - in other words, the payments made little difference to the sentence for his appalling crimes. At the same time, the judge made it clear that he was acquitting Obara on the charges relating to Lucie, not because any money was paid, but because the case lacked any direct evidence linking him with her death.

This was something Tim had worried away at for months. While all the evidence pointed to Obara's guilt in the Lucie case, all of it was circumstantial. There was no video of Lucie being attacked (Obara had videoed himself raping his other victims); there was no DNA on her body; there were no traces of her blood in the apartment where he was alleged to have cut up her body. 'If only Jane had been sitting in the court to hear the judge's summing up and to read the translations, she would know the truth about the circumstantial evidence,' said Tim...more...

[Captain Japan]

[Mulboyne]

ZakZak has a report that 100 million yen in condolence money was also paid to the family of Carita Ridgeway. Obara's lawyer says that Ridgeway's father accepted the money on the 1st July. Obara is appealing his sentence while prosecutors are appealing the not guilty verdict handed down in the Blackman case.

[Takechanpoo]

Ridgeway's bought his spirit.
By the way, most of Japanese already have forgotten this incident.

[Greji]

Ridgeway's bought his spirit.
By the way, most of Japanese already have forgotten this incident.

Unfortunately, I think you're probably right on this, but it will be interesting to see how the prosecutions appeal goes!