Over the course of four days in Tokyo earlier this month, Ronda Payne spent 80 minutes in total with her son, Chris Payne.
They couldn’t hug or even touch. He was behind a clear barrier at a detention center in Tokyo, where he spends his days in solitary confinement, beset with a host of health issues that include vomiting blood.
Chris, 34, has spent nearly four and a half years in detention in Japan, at various facilities, as he and his supporters, including Innocence Project Japan, battle for his freedom.
In December, the Tokyo High Court remanded a criminal case against him for sexual assault to a lower court for retrial because of what the court acknowledged were questions about the DNA evidence in the case; his attorneys and supporters say the DNA evidence was tampered with and is not a match for Chris.
Additionally, data from Chris’s cellphone does not place him at the scene of the alleged sexual assault, his legal team and supporters have said, and he has evidence that he was not in the area at the time of the crime.
His supporters have been trying to get him released on bail until his retrial comes up in court, particularly given how drastically they say his health has deteriorated since December.
“Why is he still being held? Why am I visiting him, and I have to touch glass, and I have to tell him bye?” Ronda said during a news conference earlier this month held by the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Japan about her son’s case.
Tears streaming down her face, Ronda told the roomful of reporters that she didn’t know what Chris or her family did to deserve what they were going through.
“All I’m asking is, please help my son,” she said during the news conference, held the day she left to return to her home in St. John. “Today was a very bad day.”
“We went to visit him, my sister and I, for three days in a row. We laughed and we joked and he was strong, and I was strong because we were playing the game. He wants to show that he’s a man and he can handle it because he’s always been looking out for me, and I want to show that I’m that strong mom.
“But today was the day when I know I was going to go in there and let him know that I was going to have to leave on that plane, and he wasn’t coming with me yet.
“He’s sitting there, not guilty, because someone refuses to release him on bail,” she said. “It’s not fair and I’m just asking as many of you as possible, if you could please, please get this out as much as possible so my son can be free and we can live our lives as much as possible again.”
Finally, Ronda said, her son’s case is gaining some traction and reaction. A Post-Tribune story on Thanksgiving, the four-year mark for when Chris was first taken into custody, began making the rounds and eventually was taken on by other reporters, including one for the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Japan.
“Exposure is everywhere now,” Ronda said by phone about her son’s case, after she returned to the U.S. from visiting Tokyo from March 2 to 6.
Ronda is the founder and director of Midwest Elite Preparatory Academy in Merrillville, the school that Chris graduated from. Ronda moved to St. John from Crown Point a few years ago.
The FCCJ held a news conference March 6 that included Ronda; Kiyomi Tsunogae, one of Chris’s attorneys; and family friend Kota Handa, whose daughter is Chris’s former girlfriend.
During the news conference, Tsunogae said that Chris has spent four years in detention for a crime he didn’t commit. Chris, she said, was convicted on DNA evidence that was manipulated to create a probable match.
Additionally, the case demonstrates Japan’s hostage justice system, “the arbitrary detention system rooted so deeply in Japan.”
While prosecutors insisted the DNA evidence couldn’t be tampered with, the Tokyo High Court overturned Chris’s conviction and sent the case back to the Chiba District Court, Tsunogae said.
“We think he’s innocent. They don’t have enough evidence for him to be guilty,” she said, adding the case could continue for another two or three years.
Chris’s supporters and defense team want him released on bail. His original sentence was for eight years, and if he remains in custody awaiting another trial, “it’s going to be eight years, like he’s guilty,” she said. She couldn’t explain why he’s been held in solitary confinement for much of his time in detention.
Additionally, since mid-December, Chris’s health has deteriorated, prompting a letter from a doctor explaining why Chris should be released on bail, Tsunogae said. In addition to vomiting blood, Chris also has suffered from nose bleeds, headaches, chest pain and weakness.
The reason prosecutors are keeping Chris in custody, Tsunogae said, is because of the “risk of destroying evidence. We think it’s impossible for Chris to destroy DNA evidence, and that’s the only evidence they have, so we think it’s really unreasonable to keep him detained.”
During the FCCJ news conference and again on the phone with the Post-Tribune, Ronda said that when she visited Chris, she focused on their limited time together.
“He’s alive — that was my focus,” she said by phone. “I didn’t see any bruises, that he was beaten. I can’t see anything internally,” she said, adding his clothes were big, but she couldn’t tell if that was from weight loss.
“I tried to look for all the things, but in the meantime, you only have 20 minutes” for each visit, she said.
Chris had been in Japan for eight years at the time of his arrest. She saw him a handful of times before his incarceration, though their time together has obviously been limited since then.
Ronda’s most recent visits, when she was in Tokyo for the FCCJ news conference, were particularly difficult. Even if Chris was suffering during their most visits, Ronda said, he wouldn’t tell her.
“I will fight based on what he’s not telling me,” she said by phone.
She has been in repeated contact with the U.S. Embassy in Japan. Officials there have told her that Chris needs to continue telling the detention center what he needs.
“That’s the crazy thing,” Ronda said. “He’s not even in prison. He’s in pretrial detention.”
She also has been in contact with an assortment of federal officials, including the office of U.S. Rep. Frank Mrvan, D-Highland, and even reached out to President Donald Trump.
The State Department has not been able to provide information on whether it is aware of or investigating Chris Payne’s case.
“The United States has no higher priority than the safety and security of U.S. citizens,” a State Department spokesperson said previously in an email to the Post-Tribune. “Whenever a U.S. citizen is detained abroad, the Department works to provide consular assistance in accordance with U.S. law and our responsibilities under U.S. and international law. Due to privacy and other considerations, we have no further comment at this time.”
For now, and with more exposure after the FCCJ news conference, Ronda wants to use the media to get the word out about Chris, “and to tell my story as a mother,” because then it becomes a matter of the heart and not of politics.
When Chris left for Japan, Ronda felt safe about his travels there, in part because of the country’s high criminal conviction rate, at greater than 99%. Now, she sees that rate from a different point of view and has come to view the country’s criminal justice system, as have its other critics, as a “hostage justice system.”
Being held hostage, Ronda said, implies a need to pay a ransom, but that isn’t even possible in Chris’s case.
“We can’t even bargain. Nobody is telling us what they want,” Ronda said.
