People Who Eat Darkness: The True Story of a Young Woman Who Vanished From the Streets of Tokyo--And the Evil That Swallowed Her Up
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Annette’s final comments speak to what, in a Western jurisdiction, are two crucially distinct duties of the court: the adjudication of guilt or innocence, and the sentencing of a convicted defendant. If Obara had pleaded, or been found, guilty, then the views of his victims’ families would reasonably have been taken into account in deciding his sentence. But at this stage, he was a defendant who vigorously denied all the charges against him.
To invite the views of the bereaved at this stage, when the accused should still have been under the presumption of innocence, reinforced the impression given by so many other aspects of the Japanese justice system that the defendant’s guilt had been unofficially established before he stepped into court and that the trial was a hollow ritual.
“I have never accepted any count of the criminal prosecution on this trial,” Obara wrote in a statement prepared for these hearings. “On the other hand, the statements by the relatives of Carita Ridgway and Lucie Blackman are supposed to be directed towards the offender. Therefore, if I appear in court, I am afraid that I would be regarded as the offender and I would be supposed to accept it … I am afraid that this must reduce the criminal court to a venue for retaliation and criticism, resulting in hatred and regret.” Justice Tochigi refused to allow this document to be read out in court.
* The existence of a “black substance” on Lucie’s head was raised repeatedly by the defense. Postmortem photographs showed a tarry liquid on her head and in her mouth. The lawyers never spelled out what they thought it was, but the implication seemed to be that it was formed when the head was burned, and that this further exculpated Obara because none of the witnesses to his behavior in the days after Lucie’s disappearance had reported signs of a fire.
* Huw had by now moved to Kuala Lumpur. He had embarked on a short-lived engagement to a Malaysian princess, and had a new business, as the partner of the psychic Ron Bard.
* Mr. Arai encouraged me to take away the photographs; I sent them back to him, as he had asked, the following week. Four months later, in an indignant letter, he accused me of “delivering copies to Scotland Yard which then showed the copies to the family of the deceased Ms Lucie Blackman.” He went on: “This act of yours not only violated the promise you owed to your source and damaged a relationship of mutual trust, but also hurt the family and increased their grief. Such an act should never be forgiven as a journalist and as a human being.” There was no truth whatever to any of these assertions.
* The principal article of evidence, of course, was the stenographer’s transcript of the hearing. But although the trial was conducted in public, this was not a public document and it required the permission of the judge for it to be made available to my lawyers.
* It was forbidden to make public official documents such as this without the court’s permission; police muttered angrily of a prosecution for publishing evidence in an ongoing criminal case. But somebody had thought of this: the website—with its suffix “.cx”—was hosted in the obscure Australian territory of Christmas Island. No criminal investigation was ever pursued.
* For a fuller account of the publication of The Truth About the Lucie Case, see pp. 448–49.
*The Truth About the Lucie Case (pp. 751–52) refers to various former teachers who “doted” on Obara, but none was ever called in his defense. In particular, “Professor Emeritus Sekiguchi” of Keio University is described as having been “shocked” at the news of Obara’s arrest. Unfortunately, the professor died shortly before his former student was charged.
* Other taboos include the power of organized crime and the ultranationalist far right, and the Imperial Family and its role.
* The most notorious such case was the “Wakayama curry killings.” In 1998, two adults and two children died after consuming curry served at a village festival in Wakayama prefecture. A forty-seven-year-old woman, Masumi Hayashi, was eventually sentenced to death for the murders, after traces of arsenic were found in her home. Hayashi insisted that the poison was the residue of a pest-control business once operated by her husband. No one saw her lacing the curry, and the prosecutors failed to adduce a convincing motive for the indiscriminate killings.
* In fact, a single legal avenue remained open: a retrial. Obara’s lawyers argued that there was new evidence that had not been heard in the lower courts. But all of this had already been submitted to, and rejected by, the supreme court. As a means of winning Obara’s freedom, retrial appeared to be a theoretical possibility only.