Capital punishment in Japan
If the crime was serious, the body was exposed to the public for three days, used for test cutting with a Japanese sword (tameshigiri), or had its property confiscated by the government.The revised law by Tokugawa Yoshimune stated that the criminal should be buried in the ground from the neck down and exposed to the public for two days, and if any of the victim's relatives or passersby so requested, he or she should actually be sawed to death.[9][7] In 1871 during the Meiji era (1868–1912), as the result of a major reform of the penal code, the number of crimes punishable by death was decreased and excessively harsh torture and flogging were abolished.In Japan, the courts follow guidelines laid down in the trial of Norio Nagayama, a 19-year-old from a severely disadvantaged background, who committed four separate robbery-murders in 1968 and was finally hanged in 1997.The court ruled that the penalty shall be decided in consideration of the degree of criminal liability and balance of justice based on a nine-point set of criteria.The third case was that of a man convicted of murdering an elderly woman for robbery shortly after being paroled from a life sentence imposed for a similar crime.[16] According to Article 475 of the Japanese Code of Criminal Procedure, the death penalty must be executed within six months after the failure of the prisoner's final appeal upon an order from the Minister of Justice.[18] Japanese death row inmates are imprisoned inside the detention centers of Tokyo, Osaka, Nagoya, Sendai, Fukuoka, Hiroshima and Sapporo.[22][needs update] Chris Hogg of the BBC reports Amnesty International's perspective—which combines description and interpretation regarding conditions and foreknowledge—that condemned live under a "harsh regime and in solitary confinement with the ever-present fear of execution.[25] Between 1966 and 2022, nine juvenile criminals received death sentences that were finalized: Misao Katagiri, Kiyoshi Watanabe, Mitsuo Sasanuma, Fumio Matsuki, Sumio Kanno, Tsuneo Kuroiwa, Norio Nagayama, Teruhiko Seki and Takayuki Mizujiri.Endo, who was 19 at the time of the double murder, was the first minor to be given the death sentence since Japan lowered the legal adulthood age to 18 in April 2022.The poll showed 74% of Japan citizens favoring the death penalty, tied with South Korea and more than any other of the surveyed countries, including the United States (67%).Charles Lane of The Washington Post claims that this embarrassed the Ministry of Justice, whose officials sincerely believed that such mistakes by the system were almost impossible.[38] Supporters say that capital punishment is justified and only to those who have committed the most extreme of crimes — a single murder is not considered to warrant a death sentence unless there are additional aggravating circumstances, such as rape or robbery.In the 1956 debate, Japanese serial killer Genzo Kurita, who engaged in rape and necrophilia, was cited by the Diet as an example of a murderer whose crimes were atrocious enough to merit death.[35] Since executions resumed in 1993, a rise in street crime during the 1990s, the sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway in 1995 have hardened attitudes amongst the public and the judiciary.Since 1999, there have been a series of cases in which criminals sentenced to life imprisonment have been given the death penalty after prosecutors successfully appealed to high courts.[41] Although single murderers rarely face a death sentence in Japan, Takeshi Tsuchimoto, a criminal law scholar at Hakuoh University and former prosecutor of the Supreme Public Prosecutors' Office, expected that the recent trend toward harsher punishments, backed by the growing public support for capital punishment, would encourage the court to sentence Kanda and Hori (of the Rie Isogai case) to death.[44] The Sankei Shimbun, a major national paper on the right, evaluated the judgement with a phrase "a natural and down-to-earth judgment of great significance".[44][45] The Tokyo Shimbun expressed that capital punishment would be the inevitable sentence in consideration of the brutality of the murder and the pain that the victim's family felt.[44] Hiroshi Itakura, a criminal law scholar at Nihon University, said that this decision could be a new criterion for capital punishment under the lay judge system.The potential for miscarriages of justice is built into the system: confessions are typically extracted while suspects are held in daiyo kangoku, or "substitute prisons", for interrogation before they are charged.
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