Atain Takitota, 41, was awarded $500,000 “for the loss of eight years and two months” of his life, the Bahamas Court of Appeal ruled.<\/P><\/p>\n
Atain said he went to a casino in Paradise Island shortly after he arrived in the Bahamas in August 1992 from Osaka, Japan. After he lost between $7,000 and $8,000 gambling, he realized that his luggage, which held his passport and the rest of his money, had been stolen.<\/P><\/p>\n
Police arrested him that night, at first suspecting that he had tried to break into a vehicle and later believing that he was a vagrant. Authorities held Atain at two locations, including a maximum-security cell.<\/P><\/p>\n
“What is particularly troubling about this case is that not once during the entire eight-year period that the appellant was incarcerated was he taken before any court at any time,” the three-judge panel said in the ruling Thursday.<\/P><\/p>\n
The only reason immigration authorities gave for his detention was that he was “an undesirable and his presence was not conducive to the public good,” the judges said.<\/P><\/p>\n
Atain tried to commit suicide twice while in detention.<\/P><\/p>\n
Judges said medical staff at a rehabilitation center in Nassau determined he was suffering from retrograde amnesia – in which the memory loss relates to events that occurred before a traumatic event.<\/P><\/p>\n
Atain has testified that he was in a traffic accident about a year before he left Japan and had suffered head injuries, the judges said.<\/P><\/p>\n
It was not clear if Atain had known his identity, but the Japanese Embassy in the Dominican Republic said initial investigations in 1994 did not identify him as a Japanese citizen.<\/P><\/p>\n
Phone calls on Saturday to Atain’s attorney were not immediately returned. Calls to the Japanese Embassy in the Dominican Republic went unanswered.<\/P><\/p>\n
PACO NUNEZ, Associated Press<\/SMALL><\/P><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A Japanese amnesiac who was kept in a Bahamas prison and an immigration center for eight years without being charged was held unlawfully, a court has ruled.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"rop_custom_images_group":[],"rop_custom_messages_group":[],"rop_publish_now":"initial","rop_publish_now_accounts":{"facebook_10223285771444175_51037792744":""},"rop_publish_now_history":[],"rop_publish_now_status":"pending","footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-249039","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-headlines"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bahamasb2b.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/249039","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bahamasb2b.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bahamasb2b.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bahamasb2b.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bahamasb2b.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=249039"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.bahamasb2b.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/249039\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bahamasb2b.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=249039"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bahamasb2b.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=249039"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bahamasb2b.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=249039"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}