Tokyo — For more than two decades, the widow of Michitoshi Kuma has pursued a singular objective: to clear her husband's name in a Japanese court after the state took his life. On February 17, Fukuoka High Court delivered its answer — no.
Presiding Judge Yoshihisa Mizokuni rejected the defense's appeal against the June 2024 dismissal of a second retrial request, ruling that new witness testimony submitted as evidence was not credible. "It must be said that it is extremely difficult to trust her testimony," Judge Mizokuni wrote in the decision, referring to a woman who claimed she had seen the child victims on a different day than recorded in the official investigation. The judge found that the discrepancies in the witness account extended beyond timing, and concluded that it was "unlikely police officers would have fabricated the statements, risking confusion in the investigation."
Defense lawyers have announced they will file a special appeal with the Supreme Court — the final step in a legal journey that began before Kuma was executed at age 70 in 2008.
The 1992 Iizuka murders
The case centres on the killings of two seven-year-old girls, both first-grade students, in Iizuka, Fukuoka Prefecture, in 1992. Michitoshi Kuma was convicted of the murders and sentenced to death. The sentence was finalised in 2006. He was executed two years later.
The defense's second retrial request rested partly on the woman's testimony that she had seen the children alive on a day after the date recorded in police statements, which would have undermined the prosecution's timeline. It also raised questions about whether investigators had pressured witnesses and constructed a version of events inconsistent with actual memories. The Fukuoka District Court dismissed the request in June 2024; the high court has now affirmed that dismissal.
Why posthumous retrials are structurally near-impossible in Japan
Japanese criminal procedure permits retrial applications — including, uniquely, posthumous applications filed by family members or legal representatives after an execution. The Jinsoku Saiban (迅速裁判) principle, which emphasises the finality and speed of criminal judgments, runs in structural tension with the right to seek retrial, creating a system where the bar for newly discovered evidence is set extraordinarily high.
To succeed, a retrial applicant must demonstrate that new evidence, considered alongside the original evidence, would necessarily lead to acquittal — not merely raise doubt, but compel a different verdict. Courts have interpreted this standard conservatively. The result is a system in which the formal right to posthumous retrial exists but the substantive pathway is exceptionally narrow.
The Fukuoka High Court's ruling is consistent with this pattern. The judge did not find the new evidence irrelevant; he found it insufficient to clear the demanding threshold. That distinction — between evidence that raises questions and evidence that compels acquittal — is the structural gate that filters out the vast majority of retrial applications, including posthumous ones.
A Supreme Court special appeal on a retrial rejection is itself unusual. The Supreme Court reviews questions of law, not facts, and special appeals in this context typically argue that the lower court applied the wrong legal standard. Whether the defense can construct a viable legal argument — distinct from the factual questions about the witness's credibility — will determine whether the Supreme Court agrees to hear the case.
Japan and capital punishment
Japan is one of two developed democracies, alongside the United States, that retains the death penalty. Both countries have seen periodic high-profile cases in which the reliability of the original conviction has been challenged years after execution — most notably the Iwata case, in which a man executed in 1976 was acquitted posthumously in 2024, one of the rare instances where a Japanese court granted a posthumous retrial and overturned a conviction.
The Iwata exoneration intensified scrutiny of Japan's capital punishment system and its safeguards against wrongful execution. Critics, including the Japan Federation of Bar Associations, have argued that the combination of high conviction rates, limited discovery rights for defense attorneys, and the irreversibility of execution creates an unacceptable risk of irreversible error.
The government has consistently maintained that capital punishment is constitutional and that Japanese courts apply sufficient procedural protections. Prime ministerial decisions to authorise individual executions are made with no public announcement in advance and typically disclosed only after the fact — a practice that human rights organisations have condemned as inconsistent with transparency norms.
What the widow's fight represents
The widow of Michitoshi Kuma has not been named publicly in court documents. She has pursued two separate retrial applications, engaged successive legal teams, and continued after her husband's death. Her persistence reflects a phenomenon familiar in high-profile wrongful conviction cases across the region: where the state will not revisit a settled verdict, the family becomes the only institutional memory keeping the case alive.
In Japan, where social pressure toward closure and deference to official judgment run deep, the public act of continuing to contest a capital conviction carries its own significance — an insistence that the question is not settled, whatever the courts have decided.
The Supreme Court may agree to hear the appeal. It may decline. If it declines, the legal avenues will be exhausted. The factual questions — whether the witness's account was fabricated, whether the original timeline holds — will remain open in the way that contested capital cases always do: unresolved in law but unresolved in fact.
Watch what they do, not what they say. In East Asian justice systems, the formal structure of finality often conceals the informality of doubt.
