Govinda Mainali’s long wait for justice in a jail in Japan may finally be coming to an end as the Tokyo High Court is set to re-examine new DNA evidence and decide on 7 June whether to retry Govinda Mainali who is serving a life sentence for the murder of a Japanese woman in 1997.
Mainali, now 45, has always claimed his innocence in the death of the 39-year-old Yasuko Watanabe, who was an employee of the Tokyo Electric Power Co but worked as a call girl by night in Tokyo’s Shibuya district.
The new evidence proves that there was another male at the crime scene, giving sufficient grounds to doubt Mainali’s guilt and to justify a retrial. The semen recovered from Watanbe is not Mainali’s and the DNA matched that of another male who body hair was found in the room where the body was found, lawyers said.
Tokyo police originally arrested Mainali, a father of two daughters from Jhapa who was getting ready to return to Nepal, for overstaying his visa and later arrested him for robbing and murdering Watanbe. The Tokyo District Court acquitted Mainali in 2000, citing lack of evidence but the High Court overturned the verdict and sentenced him to life.
Mainali’s lawyers, who are fighting pro bono in what they see as a miscarriage of justice, insist that the new DNA evidence proves beyond doubt that the victim had intercourse with someone else. The prosecutors have argued that there isn’t enough ground for a retrial.
A group of Japanese with links to Nepal set up the ‘Justice for Govinda’ pressure group that has been struggling to keep the case alive and to prove his innocence throughout mainali’s 15 years of incarceration. The group has paid to fly Govinda’s wife, Radha, and two daughters to Tokyo to visit him in prison to keep his morale up before the retrial verdict.
The Japan Federation of Bar Associations has come out publicly in support of a retrial based on new evidence because of recent cases of innocents being incarcerated.
Kunda Dixit
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