Thursday - August 23, 2007

Did you even know Japan had a death penalty?

I was very surprised to find out Japan regularly carries out executions.  More surprisingly, Japan uses hanging to carry out the death sentence.

Japan carried out three hangings today, setting a 31-year record for executions as it struggles to reduce a growing death row population.

In keeping with Japanese practice, the prisoners were hanged in secret, without independent witnesses, and after years in solitary confinement. The condemned men were told of their imminent deaths only this morning; their relatives and lawyers were informed after the event.

Japan has now carried out ten hangings in ten months, the most intense period of executions since 1976, when twelve people were hanged in a single year. It appears to be a response to the increasing number of death row inmates, which this year rose to more than a hundred for the first time, after a 15-month unofficial moratorium on executions.

The last Minister of Justice, a Buddhist lawyer named Seiken Sugiura, opposed the death penalty on moral grounds and did not sign any execution orders. His successor, Jinen Nagase, reportedly has an enthusiasm for clearing the backlog. According to the Asahi newspaper, he has told unnamed associates: “I’ll do [execute] double figures in my term [as minister].”

Hifumi Takezawa, 69, and Yoshio Iwamoto, 63, were hanged today in Tokyo Detention House and Kozo Segawa, 60, in the central city of Nagoya. All were convicted of multiple murders.

In 1990, Takezawa killed a 68-year old man whom he mistakenly believed was having an affair with his wife. He took him into a forest, forced him to write a fake suicide note, strangled him with a rope, and set fire to his car. Three years later, for the same reason, he and an accomplice broke into a house and stabbed to death a man and his wife before burning down their house.

His lawyers argued that Takezawa had suffered a stroke that turned him into a jealous paranoiac who could not be held responsible for his actions, but his appeals were rejected.

Author: The Machiavellian
Technorati Tags: Japan death penalty
Technorati Cosmos:
Technorati Watchlist:
Add this entry to: