Kazuyoshi Miura was a Japanese businessman who was accused of taking out a hit on his wife during a 1981 trip to L.A. In Japan, he was convicted of murder but then acquitted on appeal. Apparently after that he figured that he was off the hook, and made trips to Saipan, a U.S. Territory, where he was arrested earlier this year. He was extradited to California to face conspiracy charges, and committed suicide within a day of arrival. [CNN]
Apparently, with Mark Geragos as your attorney, even a 27-year-old case, in which you’ve already been acquitted of the main murder charge, is pretty hopeless.
The U.S. authorities had to catch him on U.S. soil rather than try him for conspiracy in Japan, why? Because conspiracy is not a crime in Japan. I know nothing about Japanese law, but I’ve heard that bit because Jack McCoy said it in a Law & Order episode, “Gaijin,” in which a Japanese businessman is accused of taking out a hit on his wife during a trip to New York. Rather than try him in Japan or extradite him, Fred Thompson Arthur Branch is able to arrest the suspect by fooling him into a voluntary trip to New York—by convincing him that he’s off the hook with an announcement that they have the murderer and an invitation for him to be a witness.
This episode aired in 2004. And life takes after fiction, as U.S. authorities in 2008 make a surprise arrest of the Japanese suspect during a voluntary trip to American lands.
