Japanese nurse 'not guilty' after 12 years in jail

ANKARA

A nurse in Japan was pronounced not guilty by a court after over 12 years in prison, according to local reports on Tuesday.

Fifteen years after being convicted for murdering a 72-year-old patient in 2003 by allegedly removing his respirator at a hospital in the western province of Shiga, an earlier confession by nurse Mika Nishiyama, 40, was found by a court to be "unreliable," Kyodo news agency reported.

Claiming that investigators had "coerced" her, Nishiyama later retracted her confession, which judges said "changed drastically" on the "key point of whether the alarm of the respirator continued to ring." She walked out of jail in 2017.

Presiding Judge Naoki Onishi said there was "no foul play" and that the patient could have suffered "a fatal irregular heartbeat or a lack of oxygen after not having his sputum sucked out."

"I'm very happy. My parents shed tears of joy," Nishiyama said at a news conference along with her mother, 69, in Otsu, the provincial capital.

Prosecutors did not contest the new evidence presented by Nishiyama's defense team, which also included a doctor diagnosing arrhythmia as a possible cause of death.

Prosecutors have 14 days to appeal against the ruling.