“You drove your father to his death. And now you're trying to change the subject by telling me that he was made a fool...”
Death Note spent a hundred chapters making this man the joke, and the payoff needs every one of them. Matsuda is the one who gets patronized in briefings, who blurts, who has to be managed. He is also, in chapter seventy-four, the person who reassured a dying Soichiro Yagami that Light was not Kira, and he said it to comfort him, and it was false, and he said it because he believed it. So the moral verdict in the warehouse goes to the character with the least standing and the largest personal debt, and it is the only accusation in the scene that is about a man rather than a principle. Near has the evidence. Matsuda has the grievance, and the grievance is what makes Light bleed.
Nobody in the warehouse is less qualified to pass this judgment. Matsuda has no case, no authority to execute anyone, and a personal stake that would disqualify him from any investigation, and he is wrong on procedure besides, since Light is already finished and shooting him settles nothing. Grant all of it. Then read what Near says a chapter earlier: that nobody can tell right from wrong, that even with a god's teachings in front of him he would still have to decide for himself, and that he is no different from Light Yagami. That is the most sophisticated position anyone in the series reaches and it cannot convict. The only person present capable of certainty is the one everybody has spent years talking over. Death Note hands him the gun and declines to apologize for it.
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Death Note spent a hundred chapters making this man the joke, and the payoff needs every one of them. Matsuda is the one who gets patronized in briefings, who blurts, who has to be managed. He is also, in chapter seventy-four, the person who reassured a dying Soichiro Yagami that Light was not Kira, and he said it to comfort him, and it was false, and he said it because he believed it. So the moral verdict in the warehouse goes to the character with the least standing and the largest personal debt, and it is the only accusation in the scene that is about a man rather than a principle. Near has the evidence. Matsuda has the grievance, and the grievance is what makes Light bleed.