Talk:Tapes/@comment-26037005-20151208214610/@comment-27337549-20151217130030

Well, I was under the impression that most of the "evidence" he had was circumstantial at best.

1) There was no murder weapon or bloody uniform found (likely in the incinerator).

2) Most of the evidence he had was hear-say from other students.

3) It was the Journelist who came to the police, so they likely didn't actually find anything that linked Ryouba to the murder in their six-hour long investigation of the campus.

4) There is still a bias with gender today, let alone in Japan during the 80s. People probably found it easy to see the older male as the bad guy and a young school girl as an innocent victim.

5) He never mentioned taking photos that proved she did anything wrong. The most he would have caught outside of school would have been pictures of her swooning at her Senpai at a distance or walking behind some school girls, which was quickly turned against the Journelist as evidence of him being a pervert.

Plus as you mention the tapes could be full of unreliable narration with them being painful memories of an aged, drunken, washed out Journelist. The Trial might have not been as one-sided as it seemed to him. I remember reading that Japan's court everyone is "Guilty until proven innocent" and he had likely been grilled and publicly humiliated by Ryoba's defense attorney, "Why were you following the client in the first place, Witness?" and "Did you actually witness her commiting murder, Witness?"