The Tokyo District Court decided Thursday it would show an hour¡¯s worth of video recordings of a prosecutor interrogation during oral proceedings next month for a trial in which a man sued the state over alleged unlawful interrogations.
Naoyuki Ikuta, 52, president of Techno System, a company engaging in solar power generation-related business, is demanding ?11 million ($67,800) in damages, saying he had been improperly interrogated by the special investigation squad of the Tokyo District Public Prosecutor¡¯s Office after being arrested by them.
Ikuta, who had been indicted on fraud charges and sentenced to 11 years in prison in the first trial, has filed an appeal.
In the damages lawsuit, he demanded that the state submit to the district court video data of the entire interrogation as evidence and the court show excerpts of the data ¨D 61 scenes totaling an hour and 15 minutes ¨D in the courtroom.
¡°We hope the fact that inappropriate interrogations will be exposed to the public and could become a target of criticism will lead to suppression of such practices in the future,¡± Ikuta¡¯s attorney Hiroshi Kawatsu told reporters after Thursday¡¯s oral proceeding.
According to the complaint, Ikuta was interrogated by prosecutors for 41 days in a row between May 2021 and July 2021, totaling roughly 205 hours.
He said that prosecutors insulted and threatened him, saying things like ¡°Being hostile to the Public Prosecutor¡¯s Office means (you are a part of) antisocial forces.¡± Ikuta said his right to remain silent and his personal rights were infringed.
The state argued the interrogations were not something that went beyond the scope of what is socially acceptable.
Separately, Ikuta made a request to the Tokyo District Court to commit a case for trial against prosecutor Hiroshi Horiki, 57, who was in charge of his interrogation, after the Tokyo High Public Prosecutor¡¯s Office dropped the charges of coercive interrogation against Horiki due to insufficient evidence in March.
The court accepted the request on June 24 and decided to bring Horiki to a criminal trial.
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