Sadamichi Hirasawa - Arrest and Trial

Arrest and Trial

Hirasawa was caught by the police due to the Japanese habit of exchanging business cards with personal details. There had been two other extremely similar cases of attempted and actual theft at banks via the use of poison in the weeks and months prior to the robbery. In all cases the poisoner, a lone male, left a business card. The poisoner used a card which was marked "Jiro Yamaguchi" in one of the two incidents, but it was later found that said Yamaguchi did not exist: the card was a fake. The poisoner also used a real card which was marked "Shigeru Matsui" (of the Ministry of Health and Welfare, Department of Disease Prevention) in another of the two incidents. The original owner of the card was found to have an alibi. Matsui told the police that he had exchanged cards with 593 people, but of these 100 were of the type used in the poisoning incidents of which 8 remained in his possession. Matsui recorded the time and place of the business card exchange on the back of cards he received so the police set out to trace the remaining 92 cards. 62 cards were retrieved and their receivers cleared, a further 22 were deemed to have been irrelevant to the case. One of the remaining 8 cards was received by Hirasawa. The police were led to arrest Hirasawa because

1. he could not produce the card he had received from Matsui. Hirasawa claimed to have lost the business card together with his wallet due to his having been the victim of pickpocketing.
2. a similar amount of money to that stolen from the bank was found in Hirasawa's possession whose origin he refused to divulge. The origin of the money is unknown to this day (though some, such as the famous crime fiction novelist Seichô Matsumoto, suggested Hirasawa received it by drawing Shunga (pornographic pictures), a side business that would have been detrimental to Hirasawa's reputation as an artist).
3. being unable to verify Hirasawa's alibi of having been taking a stroll in the vicinity of the crime scene.
4. Hirasawa was identified as the poisoner by several witnesses (but only by two survivors, and see picture below).
5. He confessed to having been involved in four previous cases of bank fraud (recanted together with his subsequent confession)

He was arrested on August 21, 1948. After police interrogation which allegedly involved torture, Hirasawa confessed, but he recanted soon after. His later defence against confession was based on partial insanity, alleging that he had been troubled with Korsakoff's syndrome (as a result of rabies inoculation) and so his confession was not reliable. The court, however, disagreed and Hirasawa was given the death penalty in 1950. Until 1949, a confession had been a solid evidence under the law, even if the police tortured a person to extract a confession. The Supreme Court of Japan upheld the death sentence in 1955. His attorneys tried to have the sentence revoked, submitting 18 pleas for retrial over the following years.