Three men suffered the death penalty, Tuesday. One of them was the author of murders on his family and neighbors in 2004, the other two committed a double murder in 2003.
Le Monde with AFP
Japan executed, on Tuesday, December 21, for the first time in two years, three sentenced to death, told the France-Presse agency (AFP) a leader of the Ministry of Justice. It is a 65-year-old man condemned for the murder with the hammer and knife of seven members of his family and neighbors in 2004, and two men of 54 and 44 years convicted for a double murder committed in 2003, Has she specified.
The last execution in Japan went back to December 2019, that of a Chinese convicted of the murders of four members of the same family in the south-west of the country in 2003. Japan had executed three sentenced in 2019 and fifteen In 2018, including thirteen members of the AUM sect, involved in a sarin gas attack in the Tokyo metro in 1995.
Condened cents expect a possible execution
The support of the Nippone population at death penalty remains strong despite criticism from abroad, especially human rights organizations.
“The maintenance or not of the death penalty is a crucial issue concerning the foundations of the Japanese criminal justice system,” said Tuesday, the Deputy Secretary General of the Government of Seiji Kihara, at a press point. “While atrocious crimes cease to be committed, the death penalty must be imposed on those who have perpetrated acts of gravity and atrocity such that it is inevitable,” he added .
Tuesday executions have occurred a few days after a fire that died in a psychiatric clinic in Osaka (West), about which police officers announced the name of a suspect while a criminal investigation did not Not yet officially opened.
Japan currently has more than 100 death sentences and long years are generally flowing between the statement of sentencing and its execution by hanging, but the detainees are usually warned a few hours before their execution.
Action in court
In early November, two death sentences have launched legal action against the Nippon government, denouncing as illegal this practice, with a source of psychological disorders. “This flushes human dignity,” said AFP their lawyer, explaining that the executions were generally announced to convicts only one to two hours before, preventing them from seeing their lawyer or file an appeal.
In December 2020, the Japanese Supreme Court broke a decision that blocked the request for review of the Iwao Hakamada trial, a man today 85 years old considered the oldest sentenced to death in the world. . Mr. Hakamada has spent more than four decades in the corridors of death after his conviction in 1968 at the death penalty for the quadruple assassination of his boss and three members of the family there. This Japanese had confessed the crime after weeks of interrogations in detention before retracting. It has not stopped claiming its innocence, but the conviction had been confirmed in 1980.
When the capital punishment is applied in Japan, the convicts, whose hands are handcuffed and blindfolded, are taken over a hatch that opens under their feet, by means of a mechanism triggered by One of the three buttons attached to the wall of a contiguous piece, pressed simultaneously by three guards who do not know which is active.