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Thread: Japan Capital Punishment News

  1. #21
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    Double-killer as minor will face gallows

    The Supreme Court upheld the death penalty Monday for a man convicted of strangling and then raping a young mother and murdering her 11-month-old daughter in 1999 in Yamaguchi Prefecture when he was 18.

    The high-profile trial has sparked a lengthy legal debate over whether someone who committed such extremely cruel acts as a minor should be sent to the gallows. Initial lower court trials resulted in life imprison ment.

    The top court's 1st Petty Bench, presided over by Justice Seishi Kanetsuki, branded the crime "very evil" and said hanging is "inevitable," as there was no room for leniency even though the defendant, Takayuki Otsuki, was a minor when he committed the crimes.

    Otsuki, 30, was convicted of murdering and raping Yayoi Motomura, 23, and killing her baby daughter, Yuka, in Hikari, Yamaguchi Prefecture, on April 14, 1999.

    Otsuki, who lived nearby, broke into the apartment of Hiroshi Motomura while he was away and strangled Motomura's wife and raped her, the Hiroshima High Court said, adding that he entered the dwelling intent on committing rape.

    Otsuki was 18 years and one month old at the time of the crimes, thus his name was withheld because he was a minor. But with Monday's top court ruling, it has been made public.

    The Juvenile Law stipulates that someone younger than 18 must not be sentenced to death, but with 20 being the age of majority, the way sentences are meted out to 18- and 19-year-old offenders tends to be controversial.

    Motomura's husband, 35, has been urging capital punishment and has effectively been a public figure calling for a rethink of how the judicial system handles juvenile offenders.

    "The death sentence was what I had demanded and therefore is satisfactory. But I don't feel glad. I just solemnly accept the outcome," the husband told reporters Monday.

    "I believe judges weighed whether the defendant showed remorse or had the potential to be rehabilitated much more than merely considering that he was 18," Motomura said, adding he is not sure if age should be where the line is drawn between those sentenced to hang and those who are spared.

    Otsuki's trial started before the Yamaguchi District Court, which sentenced him to life. The Hiroshima High Court upheld that sentence, but the Supreme Court in 2006 ordered a high court retrial, saying, "It cannot be said that the age at the time of the criminal act can be a deciding factor to avoid the death sentence."

    In April 2008, the high court reversed itself and sentenced Otsuki to death, arguing at the time: "There is no reason to avoid capital punishment." Otsuki's counsel then appealed.

    The Monday ruling will be finalized in 10 days unless Otsuki's attorneys file an appeal, which the top court can either reject or replace with a different ruling.

    Other than Otsuki, five other people who were 18 or 19 when they committed murder have been sentenced to death, and one of them was hanged in 1997. The others are currently in prison.

    Each of the five were convicted of killing more than two people.

    Courts tend to equate the cruelty of the crimes with the number of victims. Thus Otsuki is the first one who was younger than 20 when he committed his crimes to get the death sentence for killing two people.

    After the ruling, defense attorneys said the court made the wrong decision. "It is extremely unjust," they said in a statement.

    The attorneys argued that Otsuki, who was abused as a child, tried to hug Yayoi Motomura, as he regarded her as a mother figure, but then he fatally overpowered her with his right hand, panicked and killed the baby. They said he had no intention to rape or kill.

    Amnesty International official Teruo Hayashi said the group opposes the death sentence no matter what the age of the criminal is. "We understand the cruelty of the act and the feeling of next of kin. But we oppose the death sentence because it is against people's right to live," he said.

    http://www.japantimes.co.jp/text/nn20120220x1.html

  2. #22
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    No conclusion reached on death penalty in Ministry of Justice seminar

    No conclusion on retaining or abolishing the death penalty was reached in a seminar that started in 2010 by the Ministry of Justice, according to a summary report the ministry released on March 9.

    "At the current time, it is not appropriate to release a conclusion," the summary report said. It included factors considered for retaining and abolishing the death penalty, such as ability to deter crime, possibility of application on innocents, the feelings of crime victims and their families, and national opinion.

    "The arguments for abolishing and retaining the death penalty vary greatly, and it is difficult to say which is correct and which is mistaken," said the report. It concluded by saying, "A deepening of the debate is hoped for."

    When asked at a press conference on March 9 whether the public will accept the application of the death penalty while a conclusion has not yet been released, Justice Minister Toshio Ogawa said, "Currently there exists the death penalty as a means of punishment, and its use will not be refrained from because there is a debate on it."

    http://mdn.mainichi.jp/mdnnews/news/...na010000c.html

  3. #23
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    Osaka court acquits death-row convict in retrial

    The Osaka District Court on Thursday acquitted a 54-year-old man who had been sentenced to death for allegedly killing his daughter-in-law and her son and setting fire to their apartment in Osaka in 2002.

    The ruling came after the Supreme Court repealed lower court guilty verdicts against Takemitsu Mori, a prison officer now on leave, and ordered the district court in April 2010 to retry his case, citing the possibility of factual errors in the previous rulings.

    Mori was arrested in November 2002, seven months after his daughter-in-law Mayumi, 28, and her 1-year-old son Toma were found dead in their apartment in the city of Osaka on April 14. He was also accused of setting fire to the apartment and burning it down.

    He had consistently pleaded not guilty, but the Osaka District Court gave him a life sentence in 2005, which the Osaka High Court then changed to the death penalty the following year.

    In Thursday's decision, Presiding Judge Kazuo Mizushima said, "The court cannot recognize that the defendant entered the apartment on the day of the crime."

    During investigations, police collected a total of 72 cigarette butts from a staircase at the apartment and found that saliva on one of them matched Mori's DNA type.

    The focus of the latest trial was whether such circumstantial evidence presented by prosecutors was sufficient to find him guilty.

    In its 2010 decision, the Supreme Court said, "It is extremely difficult to find the defendant guilty based solely on the indirect evidence presented in the lower court rulings...It would be a great injustice if we do not reverse" the rulings.

    http://www.cncpunishment.com/forums/...6947#post26947
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  4. #24
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    Death penalty finalized for man who killed mother, child while he was a minor

    The Supreme Court on Friday turned down an appeal by a man who had been sentenced to death for killing a young mother and her baby daughter when he was a minor.

    Takayuki Otsuki was 18 when he raped and killed 23-year-old Yayoi Motomura before strangling to death her 11-month-old daughter Yuka on April 14, 1999, in Hikari City, Yamaguchi Prefecture.

    Otsuki appealed the ruling in February, but the top court denied his appeal.

    The decision closes a case that captured the public’s imagination as the distraught father and husband Hiroshi Motomura fought for years to bring the killer to justice.

    The high-profile case has generated a debate in Japan on how to deal with violent juvenile criminals and whether they should be named by the media.

    Otsuki, who is now 30, was found guilty in 2000 and initially jailed for life by a district court, with judges citing the fact that he was a juvenile—deemed as anyone below 20 under the Juvenile Act—for their leniency.

    The sentence was upheld by the Hiroshima High Court in 2002 following an appeal by the prosecution.

    The decisions led Motomura to tell media that he would wait for Otsuki’s release and kill him.

    However, following a long campaign by Motomura, the case was finally heard in 2006 by the Supreme Court, which asked the high court to review the sentence. It said the original court decision failed to offer clear rationale to avoid the death penalty.

    Two years later the high court changed its decision and passed the death sentence on Otsuki.

    In the final ruling, Justice Seishi Kanetsuki said the defendant’s criminal responsibility is so significant that the court must approve the death penalty, even though he was a juvenile at the time of the crime.

    The court heard that Otsuki’s father regularly beat him and his mother. The mother committed suicide when he was young.

    http://deathpenaltynews.blogspot.com/
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  5. #25
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    Lay judge death sentences must be unanimous: JFBA

    Following a series of wrongful imprisonment cases, the Japan Federation of Bar Associations recently proposed that death sentences be handed down unanimously in lay judge trials, presided over by three professional judges and six citizens.

    "People have been unfairly accused even in capital cases, thus it is necessary to introduce the unanimity rule when issuing a death sentence to prevent miscarriages of justice," the JFBA said, noting that death-row inmates have been acquitted after retrial in four postwar murder cases.

    Under the current system, verdicts are based on "conditional majorities" that must include at least one professional judge.

    Enforced on May 21, 2009, the lay judge law stipulates that the system must undergo a government review three years after its debut, if necessary. The JFBA's proposal was drafted with such a review in mind.

    In addition to the four death-row reversals, other murder convictions have been overturned during retrials in recent years. Toshikazu Sugaya, for example, was freed in 2010 after being found not guilty through an updated DNA analysis, but only after serving more than 17 years of a life sentence for the 1990 murder of a 4-year-old girl.

    At its annual human rights meeting last October, the JFBA expressed strong reservations about capital punishment and urged the government to immediately start public debate on abolishing the death penalty and to suspend executions during that period.

    "We compiled the proposal on the premise that capital punishment is a harsh reality, and therefore we need to improve the lay judge system given these circumstances," said Hiroshi Shidehara, a Tokyo-based lawyer and secretary general of a JFBA taskforce examining the new jury-style system.

    Amnesty International Japan official Teruo Hayashi welcomed the proposal.

    "While we oppose the death penalty, it would be desirable if the unanimity rule would make lay judge panels more cautious and restrained in issuing death sentences," he said.

    Japan has been under international pressure to abolish the death penalty.

    "Regardless of opinion polls, the state (Japan) should favorably consider abolishing the death penalty and inform the public, as necessary, about the desirability of abolition," the Geneva-based Human Rights Committee argued in 2008.

    Lawyer Shidehara suggested death sentences would definitely decline under a unanimity rule. As of the end of last year, 12 defendants had been sentenced to death in lay judge trials.

    Worldwide, 141 countries have abolished the death penalty by law or in practice and 57 still use it, according to the JFBA and Amnesty International.

    Since assuming his position in January, however, Justice Minister Toshio Ogawa has indicated he might resume issuing orders to send death-row inmates to the gallows, following a year in which no one was executed for the first time in 19 years.

    In response, the Center for Prisoners' Rights, a domestic human rights group, has collected more than 1,600 signatures for a petition backing the suspension of executions and plans to submit it to Ogawa, a former judge and a prosecutor.

    To improve the lay judge system, the JFBA proposed expanding the scope of criminal cases it handles.

    Currently, lay judges serve on serious cases ranging from murder to robbery, arson and rape, but the JFBA said even minor cases should be tried under the system if the defense counsel wants to contest the prosecution's arguments.

    The proposal was drafted mainly with wrongful accusations of train groping in mind, said Shidehara.

    "It will be significant if lay judges examine, based on the common sense of ordinary citizens, whether a defendant committed a crime as prosecutors argue," the proposal says.

    The JFBA also stressed the need to enhance the system by providing mental health care to lay judges to mitigate their anxiety over convicting and sentencing defendants.

    "It is natural that citizen judges bear more of a psychological burden than professional judges do," especially when over capital punishment cases, the lawyers' group said.

    The next step will be to hold talks with the Justice Ministry and the Supreme Court based on the proposal, according to Shidehara.

    http://www.japantimes.co.jp/text/nn20120325a5.html
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  6. #26
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    Japan Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda stands by use of capital punishment

    Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda on Friday defended the use of the death penalty, a day after three multiple murderers were executed.

    It was the first time Japan, which apart from the United States is the only major industrialized democracy to carry out capital punishment, had used the death penalty in 20 months.

    "There is no change to our policy not to abolish the death penalty," Noda told a press conference.

    "We have judged that it is difficult to immediately abolish the death penalty, considering the current situation where the number of violent crimes does not fall and crimes continue," he said.

    The convicts were hanged on Thursday on the orders of the justice minister, who said he was acting in line with public opinion, which overwhelmingly supports the death penalty.

    Noda stood by the decision, saying the system receives up to 85 per cent Japanese public approval.

    France urged Japan to impose a moratorium on the death penalty and said the executions "were even more regrettable because they occurred after Japan had not applied the death penalty for more than a year and a half."

    http://www.vancouversun.com/news/Jap...#ixzz1qbUWB2Zs
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  7. #27
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    Tokyo High Court rejects another plea for Asahara retrial

    The Tokyo High Court has rejected a second plea for a retrial lodged by the family of Aum Shinrikyo founder Shoko Asahara, who is on death row for masterminding the 1995 deadly sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway system, among other crimes, sources said Wednesday.

    The plea was filed with the Tokyo District Court following the Supreme Court's rejection of the first request in September 2010. The high court made the decision last Thursday, the sources said.

    The district court turned down the second plea last May.

    Asahara was sentenced to death in February 2004 for the sarin attack and 12 other crimes. His conviction was finalized after the Supreme Court eventually rejected an appeal in September 2006.

    http://www.japantimes.co.jp/text/nn20120405b1.html
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  8. #28
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    Lindsay Hawker killer Tatsuya Ichihashi loses appeal

    Tatsuya Ichihashi was jailed in July last year for the murder in 2007 of Lindsay Hawker, 22, from Warwickshire.

    At the appeal, his lawyers argued the sentence was too harsh and repeated the claim made at his trial that he had accidentally suffocated Miss Hawker.

    But judges at Tokyo High Court rejected the argument and upheld the sentence.

    Miss Hawker's family, who did not attend the hearing, said in a statement: "We are relieved that the original decision was upheld and that Ichihashi's appeal was refused."

    At the time of his trial Ichihashi admitted raping and killing Miss Hawker but said she died by accident when he tried to muffle her screams.

    He was on the run for two years and eight months after the death of Miss Hawker, who was from Brandon, near Coventry, and had been teaching him English.

    Her body was found in the sand-filled bath in his apartment in March 2007.

    He evaded police by altering his appearance with cosmetic surgery and also cut himself with scissors in an attempt to change his looks. But he was finally arrested in Osaka in November 2009.

    Prosecutors at his trial argued the murder was premeditated and he had strangled Miss Hawker after raping her. They repeated this argument at his appeal and said the life term was justified.

    After the judges rejected Ichihashi's appeal, the presiding judge read a statement from Miss Hawker's family in which they said they believed the killer had shown no remorse for his actions.

    Miss Hawker's father Bill has previously called for Ichihashi to be given the "heaviest punishment" possible under Japanese law, theoretically the death penalty, but said his family had achieved justice after he was convicted.

    Under Japanese law Ichihashi will have to serve a minimum of 10 years before he can be considered for parole.

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  9. #29
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    Japan court to consider retrial over 1961 killings

    A court will Friday rule on the case of a farmer who has spent 40 years on death row for the murder of his wife, his mistress and three other women who died after drinking poisoned wine in rural Japan.

    The Nagoya high court is set to declare whether 86-year-old Masaru Okunishi should face a retrial over the killings half a century ago, a court spokesman said Thursday.

    Okunishi, who has spent much of the last four decades in solitary confinement, has consistently protested his innocence after retracting what he says was a coerced confession ahead of his original trial.

    Five women died and 12 others fell ill after drinking wine laced with agrichemicals at a community get-together in the small town of Nabari, central Japan in 1961.

    Okunishi initially told police that he put the lethal chemicals into white wine in an attempt to kill both his wife and his mistress and erase their complicated love triangle.

    But he later withdrew his confession and was acquitted. A higher court overturned that acquittal and sentenced him to death, a sentence confirmed in 1972 by the Supreme Court.

    Since then, he has become one of Japan’s longest serving death row inmates, despite repeated attempts by his lawyers to get a retrial on the basis that the women all died from consuming different chemicals.

    “I have a big hope and expectation of a (positive) decision,” Okunishi said in a message sent to local media through his supporters.

    Under Japanese law death row inmates can be retried if judges rule new evidence can legitimately reverse the verdicts.

    Apart from the United States, Japan is the only major industrialised democracy to carry out capital punishment, a practice that has led to repeated protests from European governments and human rights groups.

    International advocacy groups say the system is cruel because death row inmates can wait for their executions for many years in solitary confinement and are only told of their impending death a few hours ahead of time.

    http://www.capitalfm.co.ke/news/2012...1961-killings/
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  10. #30
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    Japan court rejects retrial over 1961 killings

    A court on rejected an appeal by a farmer who has spent 40 years on death row for the murder of his wife, his mistress and three other women who died after drinking poisoned wine in rural Japan.

    The Nagoya High Court on Friday "turned down the appeal for retrial" of 86-year-old Masaru Okunishi over the killings, a court spokesman said. The request could still go to the Supreme Court.

    Okunishi, who has spent much of the past four decades in solitary confinement, has consistently protested his innocence after retracting what he says was a coerced confession ahead of his original trial.

    But presiding judge Yasuo Shimoyama ruled "his confession is fully credible in its essential part", according to Jiji Press news agency.

    The chief judge said the defence counsel had not presented enough evidence to prove a kind of pesticide Okunishi said he had used was not the poison found in the wine, it said.

    Amnesty International protested the court decision.

    "The death penalty is an irreversible punishment and Mr Okunishi should be granted the opportunity for a retrial," the human rights group said in a statement, calling for his prompt release in consideration of his age and on humanitarian grounds.

    Five women died and 12 others fell ill after drinking wine laced with agricultural chemicals at a community get-together in the small town of Nabari, central Japan in 1961.

    Okunishi initially told police that he put the lethal chemicals into white wine in an attempt to kill both his wife and his mistress and erase their complicated love triangle.

    But he later withdrew his confession and in 1964 the Tsu District Court acquitted Okunishi, citing a lack of evidence.

    However, the prosecution appealed the verdict. The Nagoya High Court revoked the lower court decision and sentenced him to death in 1969 - a decision upheld by the Supreme Court in 1972.

    Since then, he has become one of Japan's longest serving death row inmates, despite repeated attempts by his lawyers to get a retrial on the basis that the women all died from consuming different chemicals.

    Apart from the United States, Japan is the only major industrialised democracy to carry out capital punishment, a practice that has led to repeated protests from European governments and human rights groups.

    International advocacy groups say the system is cruel because death row inmates can wait for their executions for many years in solitary confinement and are only told of their impending death a few hours ahead of time.

    http://news.yahoo.com/japan-court-re...9P2g4AwInQtDMD
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