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A Japanese high court has in a retrial acquitted a man who was convicted of killing a junior high school girl 39 years ago, the Japanese public broadcaster NHK reported.
The man has already completed his prison term, NHK reported.
On Friday, the Kanazawa branch of the Nagoya High Court issued a ruling saying it cannot be acknowledged that the defendant was proven guilty, according to NHK.
Maekawa Shoshi, now 60 years old, was originally convicted of killing the student in Fukui City, on the Sea of Japan coast, in 1986, according to NHK.
He consistently maintained his innocence and was granted a retrial last October in response to his second retrial request, according to NHK.
At the first hearing of the retrial last March, the focus of debate was the credibility of accounts by witnesses who claim they saw Maekawa in blood-stained clothing on the night of the incident, according to NHK.
The prosecution said they believed the accounts to be credible. But the defense counsel argued that police and others inappropriately led the witnesses to give testimonies that were untrue and wrongly accused Maekawa, according to NHK.
In handing down the ruling on Friday, Presiding Judge Masuda Keisuke of the Kanazawa branch of the high court said none of witness accounts can be judged credible. He said it appears that deadlocked investigators employed leading questions and other inappropriate acts, and witnesses provided the accounts desired by the investigators, leading to doubts over their credibility, according to NHK.
In the original trial, Maekawa was at first found not guilty, but the ruling was overturned in an appeal trial handled by the branch of the Nagoya High court. The court granted a retrial in 2011, but it was canceled after the prosecution objected, according to NHK.