Mr. Asahara was not charged with committing any crimes personally. They tried to make him responsible for participating in a conspiracy to work out a criminal plan. But the accused pleaded ‘not guilty’ on all the charges.
Under the circumstances we had no choice but to clarify all the points of the case and to put to the test all the evidence presented by the prosecution. The defense adopted an attitude quite natural in the situation: we did not take on trust a single accusation of the prosecution and discussed in detail every charge count trying to find factual proofs pointing to the defendant’s guilt. If there is corpus delicacy, then concrete proofs must be presented in Court. And that is precisely what is expected of justice.
The main policy of the defense was to test once and again all the facts submitted by the prosecution, all the more so, because prosecutors based their charges only on written evidence of the witnesses for the prosecution and expert reports.
To make sure that those testimonies were true we held cross-examinations of witnesses and also revealed contradictions in the prosecution’s arguments. As a result, the defense team came to the conclusion that the defendant was not guilty. The reasons for such a conclusion were given in the last speech of the defense.
The prosecution failed to present obvious proofs of the defendant’s guilt on any of the 13 charges related to the responsibility for a conspiracy.
The arguments by the defense – only those of importance – were presented on 2,250 pages containing 400 characters each. It would take about ten days to read them. All controversial points and contradictions in the prosecution’s proofs emerged at the trial due to the investigation carried out by the lawyers and cross-examinations of witnesses for the prosecution and for the defense.
It goes without saying that before court sittings begin the prosecutor must put all available evidence at the lawyers’ disposal. But it does not mean that all these pieces of evidence are relevant.
It was exactly so in this case. All the evidence presented at the first stage of the trial, i.e. written evidence of the witnesses chosen by the prosecution and all sorts of expert reports were fraudulent. This was very apparent from the least examination of the case.
Some pieces of evidence were so strange, that it was impossible to understand what they had to do with this case. So, on the whole all the evidence turned out to be untrustworthy.
In Japan lawyers carrying out criminal cases are not empowered to conduct investigations and collect evidence for themselves. So we have to make do with the evidence obtained by the police and the prosecution. In Mr. Asahara’s case nearly all the evidences’ meanings [presented in Court] were specific in a sense that their real value and relevance became obvious only during the investigation process, after the first stage of the trial was completed.
It depends on the case whether some moot points can be clarified at an early stage. In some cases it is just not possible. There are lots of variants to choose from, depending on the conditions and on how intricate the given case is.
This time defending in Mr. Asahara’s case, we divided all the issues to be examined by the court in to two groups: the ones we had to fight for and the others which could remain as they were [for the time being].
But in spite of that we had managed to clarify really important controversial points only by the time the trial was nearing completion and we had to give the last speech.
But what about earlier stages of the trial? As a lawyer I had a hard time, for instance, choosing witnesses.
