NOTICE: The following
article is written by the author itself and not by me, I am not trying to
violate their copyright. I will give some information on them. In loving memory
of Rie Isogai, I decided to post this article by Charles Lane and also some information
from Wikipedia about Capital Punishment in Japan.
PAGE
TITLE:
The Washington Post
ARTICLE
TITLE:
Why Japan Still Has the Death Penalty
DATE: Sunday, January 16,
2005
AUTHOR: Charles Lane
AUTHOR
INFORMATION: Charles "Chuck" Lane is an American journalist
and editor who is an editorial writer for The Washington Post and a
regular guest on Fox News Channel. Lane was the lead editor of The New
Republic from 1997 to 1999. After the New Republic, Lane went to work for
the Post, where, from 2000 to 2009, he covered the Supreme Court of the United
States and judicial system issues. He has since joined the newspaper's
editorial page.
 |
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Rie Isogai (磯谷 利恵 Isogai
Rie, 20 July 1976 – 25 August 2007) was a 31-year-old Japanese office clerk
who was robbed and murdered in Aichi Prefecture, Japan on the night of 24
August 2007 by three men who became acquainted through an underground message
board. Her murder led to a signature campaign to call for the death penalty on
the three murderers, one of whom was sentenced to death on 18 March 2009, and
two of the murderers were sentenced to life in prison on 13 April 2011. http://victimsfamiliesforthedeathpenalty.blogspot.com.au/2013/08/318000-signatures-as-petition-for-death.html
|
There is a place in the advanced industrial
world where people are regularly sentenced to death, and executed, for their
crimes. Some of the condemned deny their guilt -- and there are confirmed cases
of mistakes in sentencing. But government officials say the system delivers
retribution and deterrence fairly and efficiently.
This place is not Texas. It is Japan
-- the only industrial democracy other than our own that still regularly
executes convicted murderers. In 2004, the Japanese conducted two executions by
hanging, the sole method employed there. In some years, the rate is double or
triple that. This is nowhere near the rate in the United States, where 59
convicted murderers were put to death in 2004. But there are many more murders
in the United States than in Japan, and our population is 295 million people
compared to Japan's 127 million. When you adjust for those facts, Japan has
recently been about as likely as Texas and Virginia to sentence killers to
death.
Covering the Supreme Court, which has the
final say in every capital case, I have gotten used to seeing the United States
as a loner on this issue. The European Union, Canada, South Africa and a
growing portion of Latin America have abolished the death penalty. The United
States regularly absorbs condemnation from human rights organizations because
it hasn't. But the United States is joined in continuing the practice by an
officially pacifist country that many Americans think of as the cradle of
Pikachu and Hello Kitty. How come? My best guess, based on reporting I did
there this past summer: Basically, Japan's leaders are giving their people what
they want.
To be sure, democracy in Japan is not
usually thought of as highly responsive. Since World War II, Japan's government
has been dominated by a single party, the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), which
is closely allied with unelected bureaucrats who make policy behind the scenes.
The government forbids the release of basic information about the death
penalty, so public opinion is poorly informed. Executions are conducted in
secret; as former justice minister Hideo Usui told me, they are scheduled
during parliamentary recesses, so as to deprive opposition politicians of any
opportunity "to cause a big public row over the death penalty."
Still, not even capital punishment's
opponents in Japan question the basic validity of a survey conducted by the
government in 1999, which found that 79.3 percent of the public backs the death
penalty. In 34 polls taken between 1953 and 1999, abolition of capital
punishment has never garnered a majority. Letters published in the Japanese
press reflect the surprisingly intense feelings behind the polls. "I
believe execution is the best punishment for felons, especially
murderers," a citizen named Hajime Ishi wrote to the Yomiuri Shimbun in
July 2003. "Controversial as my opinion may be, I would like to see all
murderers -- regardless of their age, gender and nationality -- put to
death." In a 2003 trial, a Tokyo prosecutor made his case for a death
sentence by handing the judge a petition signed by 76,000 people.
Japanese frequently invoke culture to
account for these sentiments. One theory, of which I heard several variants, is
that the Japanese, group-oriented and with ancestral roots in village life,
have a long tradition of isolating and eliminating evildoers. Authoritarian
tenets of Confucianism, a Chinese import, may have reinforced this. Several
people told me that Japanese Buddhism, too, provides support for capital
punishment. "A basic teaching is retribution," says Tomoko Sasaki, a
former member of the Diet (Japan's parliament), an ex-prosecutor and a leading
advocate of the death penalty in the LDP. "If someone evil does something
bad, he has to atone with his own life. If you take a life, you have to give
your own."
But cultural norms, though powerful,
are not immutable; capital punishment has ebbed and flowed in Japan, both
historically and in modern times. Buddhism, famously a nonjudgmental,
nonviolent doctrine, can easily be interpreted as incompatible with the death
penalty. And a ban on capital punishment prevailed in Japan during the Heian
Era (794 A.D. to 1185 A.D.), which coincided with Buddhism's introduction to
the country from China. One of the country's most prominent anti-capital
punishment activists since the war, the late Tairyu Furukawa, was a Buddhist
priest. During the early '90s, Megumu Sato, a former Buddhist priest serving as
minister of justice, refused to sign execution orders for the year he was in
office, citing his religious beliefs.
Sato was one of four ministers who
served during a 40-month de facto moratorium on executions that began in
November 1989 and ended in March 1993. The moratorium followed a period of
increasing concern about capital punishment, both inside and outside the
Japanese government. The key events were the exonerations during the 1980s of
four death-row prisoners, all of whom had been sentenced to hang in the chaotic
period just after World War II and then spent years pursuing appeals.
The exonerations were deeply
embarrassing to the powerful Ministry of Justice, which handles all criminal
prosecutions in Japan. Ministry officials sincerely believe that such
miscarriages of justice are all but impossible under the Japanese system,
because prosecutors rarely bring charges unless the defendant confesses and
only seek the death penalty in selected cases involving multiple victims, or
where murder is combined with rape or robbery. But the exonerations forced the
country to acknowledge that several men had been sentenced to death based on confessions
squeezed out of them in prolonged custody, that the police had mishandled key
evidence -- and that such practices have not disappeared. Amid the
soul-searching, the anti-death penalty movement, traditionally marginal, gained
strength and coalesced into an umbrella organization known as Forum 90, the
first of its kind in modern Japan.
Yet, just as death-row exonerations
based on DNA evidence have dented but not overturned the basic consensus in
favor of the death penalty in the United States, the pro-death penalty
consensus in Japan proved resilient. In time, concerns about crime and violence
came to trump concerns about the rights of defendants. After an internal review
of the exonerations, which concluded mainly that authorities needed to do a better
job of ensuring truthful confessions, the Ministry of Justice resumed
executions in March 1993.
Then, on March 20, 1995, a cult known
as Aum Shinrikyo released nerve gas in the Tokyo subway, killing 12 people and
injuring thousands. Citizens demanded that the perpetrators pay with their
lives, and the authorities responded. "Politicians listen to voters'
views," Yuji Ogawara, a lawyer who represents capital defendants, told me.
"In that sense, it has become more difficult to talk about abolishing the
death penalty since Aum. It was a watershed event." Of the 50 death
sentences issued between 1999 and 2002, nine went to Aum conspirators. The
cult's founder, Shoko Asahara, was sentenced to death last year.
Something else happened in the
mid-1990s: street crime rose. Japan is still much safer than America. But what
Japanese notice is that it is less safe than it used to be. According to the
government, reported crimes registered a postwar high for six consecutive years
between 1996 and 2002 before leveling off in 2003. Causes include Japan's steep
and socially disruptive economic downturn in the '90s, as well as post-Cold War
freedom of movement among Japan, Russia and China, which brought some foreign
gang activity to Japan's shores. While the number of murders hasn't risen
rapidly, several brutal and highly publicized killings -- including a massacre
of eight schoolchildren in 2001 -- fed the public's growing sense of insecurity.
Whereas 1990 saw the founding of Forum
90, 1999 marked the founding of the National Association of Crime Victims and
Surviving Families, an influential pro-death penalty lobby. Its founder, Isao
Okamura, is a lawyer and former vice chairman of the Japan Federation of Bar
Associations, which advocates a moratorium on executions and greater legal
protections for death row inmates. But after Okamura's wife was brutally
stabbed to death in 1997, his views hardened.
The courts, which had led the way in
re-examining capital punishment two decades earlier, now were following the
public mood. On Dec. 10, 1999, Japan's Supreme Court overturned the life
sentence imposed on a man convicted of robbery and murder in Hiroshima
prefecture. It was the first time since 1983 that the Supreme Court had
recommended that a life sentence be replaced with death. This decision had a
"great influence" on trial judges, says Satoru Shinomiya, a law
professor at Waseda University in Tokyo. It has been followed by several other
rulings in which appeals courts have granted prosecution requests to overturn
life sentences in favor of the death penalty. (Such requests are not allowed in
the United States.)
Judges sentenced one person to death
in 1992 (there are no jury trials in Japan); they sentenced 18 people to death
in 2002. There are currently 60 people on death row whose sentences have been
finalized (as of Sept. 15, 2004), an increase of 10 from 1999 and more than
double the level, 24, of 1986. Meanwhile, a bill calling for a three-year
moratorium on executions and a top-to-bottom review of the capital punishment
system was shelved last year by its sponsors in the Diet, because of its poor
prospects for success.
To expect Japan to abolish the death
penalty through normal democratic processes is to expect it to do something
that Europe itself did not exactly accomplish. Germany and Italy got rid of the
death penalty immediately after World War II, when the drafters of their new
constitutions banned it. (Japan's 1946 constitution, promulgated under U.S.
occupying authorities who were also hanging Japanese war criminals, bans
"cruel" punishments; in 1948, the Japanese Supreme Court ruled that
the death penalty was not cruel.) In France, then-president Francois Mitterrand
abolished the death penalty by decree in 1981; most French citizens supported
it, but Mitterrand imposed his will thanks to the power of the French
presidency, which has no equivalent in consensus-oriented Japan. Even now,
large percentages in most European nations favor the death penalty, according
to polls. More countries continue to abolish it to meet a condition of
inclusion in the European Union. Poland, for example, abolished the death
penalty in 1997, despite surveys showing that more than 60 percent of Poles
wanted to keep it.
But opponents of the death penalty in
Japan, international and domestic, have no such leverage. Europe is not about
to slap economic sanctions on the world's second-largest economy. The strongest
punishment threatened so far is revocation of Japan's observer status on the
Council of Europe, a human rights organization made up of representatives from
44 governments -- and the council has hesitated to impose even that. For
Japanese officials, resistance to foreign critics of the death penalty may be a
relatively cost-free way to savor a little old-fashioned national sovereignty.
"We believe that the decision whether to keep or abolish the death penalty
should be the decision of each individual country, and should be based on the
public sentiment of each country, and the crime situation in each
country," says Hideo Takasaki, a senior official of the Ministry of
Justice's criminal affairs bureau.
Unless something leads Tokyo to change
that attitude, the United States won't be totally isolated. At least on this
one issue, in these two countries, East meets West.
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| Japan: The Supreme Court's No. 1 Petty Bench, which on Monday rejected the appeal of Seiichi Endo, a former senior member of the Aum Supreme Truth cult |
INTERNET SOURCE: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_punishment_in_Japan
System
Sentencing guideline – Nagayama
Standard
In Japan, the courts follow guidelines
laid down in the trial of Norio Nagayama, a 19-year-old from a disadvantaged
background, who committed four murders in 1968 and was finally hanged in 1997.
The supreme court of Japan, in imposing the death penalty, ruled that the death penalty may be imposed "inevitably" in consideration of the degree of criminal liability and balance of justice based on a nine-point set of criteria. Though technically not a precedent, this guideline has been followed by all subsequent capital cases in Japan. The nine criteria are as follows:
1. Degree of viciousness
2. Motive
3. How the crime was committed; especially the manner in
which the victim was killed.
4. Outcome of the crime; especially the number of
victims.
5. Sentiments of the bereaved family members.
6. Impact of the crime on Japanese society.
7. Defendant's age (in Japan, someone is a minor until
the age of 20).
8. Defendant's previous criminal record.
9. Degree of remorse shown by the defendant.
Stays of execution
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. However, the
period requesting retrial or pardon is exempt from this regulation. Therefore,
in practice, the typical stay on death row is between five and seven years; a
quarter of the prisoners have been on death row for over ten years. For
several, the stay has been over 30 years (Sadamichi Hirasawa died of natural
causes at the age of 95, after awaiting execution for 32 years).
Approval process
After
the failure of the final appeal process to the Supreme Court of Japan, the entire records
of trial are sent to the office of prosecution. Based on these records, the
chief prosecutor of the office of prosecution compiles a report to the Justice
Minister. This report is examined by the officer in the Criminal Investigation
Bureau of Justice Ministry for the possibility of pardon and/or retrial as well
as any possible legal issues which might require consideration before the
execution is approved. This officer is usually from the office of prosecutors.
Once satisfied, the officer will write an execution proposal, which has to go
through the approval process of the Criminal Investigation Bureau, Parole
Bureau and Correction Bureau. If the convict is certified to be mentally
incapacitated during this process, the proposal is brought back to Criminal
Investigation Bureau. The final approval is signed by the Minister of Justice.
Once the final approval is signed, the execution will take place within about a
week. By the regulation of penal code section 71, clause 2, the execution
cannot take place on a national holiday, Saturday, Sunday, or between 31
December and 2 January. The date of execution is kept secret, even to the
family of the condemned and the family of the victim(s).
Death row
Japanese
death row inmates are imprisoned inside the detention centres of Sapporo, Sendai,
Tokyo, Nagoya, Osaka, Hiroshima and Fukuoka (despite the city having a high
court, Takamatsu Detention Centre is not equipped with an execution chamber.
Consequently, executions administered by the Takamatsu High Court are carried
out in the Osaka Detention Centre). Those on death row are not classified as prisoners
by the Japanese justice system and the facilities in which they are
incarcerated are not referred to as prisons. Inmates lack many of the rights
afforded to other Japanese prisoners. The nature of the regime they live under
is largely up to the director of the detention centre, but it is usually
significantly harsher than normal Japanese prisons. Inmates are held in
solitary confinement and are forbidden from communicating with their fellows.
They are permitted two periods of exercise a week, are not allowed televisions
and may only possess three books. Prisoners are not allowed to exercise within
their own cells. Prison visits, both by family members and legal
representatives, are infrequent and closely supervised.
Execution
Executions
are carried out by hanging in a death chamber within the detention centre. When
a death order has been issued, the condemned prisoner is informed in the
morning of his/her execution. The condemned is given a choice of the last meal.
The prisoner's family and legal representatives are not informed until
afterwards. Since 7 December 2007, the authorities have been releasing the
names, natures of crime and ages of executed prisoners.
As
of late March 2012, there were 135 people awaiting execution in Japan. Tsutomu
Miyazaki and two others were hanged on 17 June 2008. A total of nine convicted
murderers were executed in 2007. Three men were executed on 23 August 2007,
four men were executed on 25 December 2006, one execution was carried out in
2005 and two in 2004.
Two
inmates were executed in July 2010, three in March 2012, three in February 2013,
and two in April 2013.
As
of late April 2013, the number of inmates in death-row was 134.
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