Kazuyoshi Miura (businessman)

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Kazuyoshi Miura (三浦和義, Miura Kazuyoshi^?, born July 27, 1947) is a Japanese businessman.

[edit] Biography

Miura, a clothing importer who often traveled to the United States, was suspected of conspiring to kill his wife, Kazumi Miura (三浦一美, Miura Kazumi^?) on November 18, 1981, while visiting Los Angeles, California, United States. On that day an unknown assailant shot Miura in the right leg and his wife in the head while the two were in a Downtown Los Angeles parking lot. The wife remained in a coma and died the following year after an Air Force hospital jet took her to Japan.

Miura said that street robbers killed his wife, and, while in the hospital, campaigned against violence in Los Angeles. Miura said that he would write letters to President Ronald Reagan and California governor Jerry Brown and ask the two to secure Los Angeles. The incident reinforced Japanese stereotypes about U.S. violence.^[1]

In 1984, Japanese newspaper articles harmed Miura's credibility; the articles revealed that he took out a life insurance policy on his wife worth the equivalent US$1.4 million. In addition an actress who said she was Miura's lover said that Miura asked her to kill his wife. Daryl Gates, the chief of the Los Angeles Police Department during the Miura incident, said that the department and Japanese police suspected Miura arranged to have his wife killed.^[2]^[3]

According to then Los Angeles District Attorney Ira Reiner LAPD homicide detectives did not believe that Miura was the perpetrator, but rather that the events had been a "vicious...street crime"^[4]. However one officer, Jimmy Sakoda, head of the Asian Crimes Squad, did not share the homicide detectives' conclusions. He took his concerns to Reiner who then began working with Japanese prosecutors.

Miura was convicted of the murder and was sentenced to life imprisonment in Japan in 1994. Four years later, the Tokyo High Court overturned the conviction and the resulting sentence, because they weren't able to identify the sniper.^[5] Reiner has stated that were it not for Sakoda's persistence the case might have been relegated to the unsolved, or cold case files.^[4]

Miura served 13 years in Japanese prisons; six years for assaulting his wife 1985 and seven more for his vacated 1988 murder conviction. Under a 2004 California law, if convicted, the time already served will be credited against any potential sentence. If Miura had been acquitted in Japan, the US-Japan Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty would have barred their investigation.^[6] Since that was not the case, US law enforcement was free to continue their investigation.

California authorities learned that Miura frequently visited U.S. territory on business, and waited until he made a trip to the island of Saipan in the U.S. Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, where he was arrested on February 22, 2008. He is currently awaiting extradition to California. ^[7]^[8]^[9] A former Federal prosecutor notes that the 27 years since the crime could help Miura's defense, "witness memories don't get better with time," she said in an interview with the International Herald Tribune.^[4]

A 2004 episode of Law & Order entitled "Gaijin", dealt with many of the aspects of the case.^[10] His case was compared to that of O. J. Simpson.^[11]