Tokyo doctor convicted for licking breast of female patient after surgery in controversial retrial
A doctor at a Tokyo hospital has been founding guilty of indecent assault by the Tokyo High Court. He is convicted of licking the breast of a female surgery immediately after she had undergone surgery in 2016.
The case is complicated, though, since the 44-year-old doctor was originally found innocent in February 2019. The Tokyo High Court overturned that verdict and handed down a two-year prison sentence instead.
The case hinged on whether or not a patient who had just received general anesthetic could reliably recount incidents straight after surgery. What she saw as the doctor licking her body could, it was argued by the defense, had been a visual hallucination caused by the anesthetic.
Though the DNA of the doctor was found on the woman’s chest, it was asserted that it could not be accurately trusted in this case because of the possibility that spit or sweat had transferred to the woman’s body during the inspection. Certain records of the DNA data were also lost; only the amount of detected DNA, scribbled on a note, was kept.
The thirtysomething female patient was having surgery to remove a tumor in her right breast. She told a friend via LINE that she thought the doctor had assaulted her, and that friend was actually the person who alerted police.
However, her reliability as a witness was called into question during the 2019 trial because she could not recall various other incidents that happened after her surgery. In her testimony, she also said that the doctor licked and sucked her breast for under five minutes. The room where the incident allegedly took place, though, had three other patients in it at the time and the door was open. According to her testimony, the same doctor returned about half an hour later to look at her breasts while masturbating.
