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Capital punishment in Japan is under scrutiny again after the world’s longest-serving death row prisoner, Iwao Hakamada, was awarded $1.4 million in compensation this week following his acquittal last year in a retrial.<\/p>\n
Stakes for wrongful convictions are high in Japan, where the death penalty has broad public support despite international criticism over how it is carried out.<\/p>\n
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Here are some things to know:<\/strong><\/p>\n Widespread Support<\/strong><\/p>\n Japan and the United States are the only two members of the Group of Seven industrialised economies to retain the death penalty.<\/p>\n There is overwhelming public support for the practice, and a 2024 Japanese government survey of 1,800 respondents showed 83 percent saw the death penalty as “unavoidable”.<\/p>\n Of them, 62 percent said the families of murder victims “would never feel vindicated” if the death penalty was scrapped.<\/p>\n But the same survey — conducted around a month after Hakamada’s acquittal — also found those in favour of abolition rose from 9 percent five years ago to 17 percent.\u00a0<\/p>\n Around 70 percent of those opposed cited the “irrevocable” consequences of executing someone wrongfully convicted.<\/p>\n Dozens On Death Row<\/strong><\/p>\n As of December 2023, some 107 prisoners were waiting for their death sentences to be carried out, the Justice Ministry told AFP. It is always done by hanging.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n The law stipulates that executions must be carried out within six months of a final verdict after appeals are exhausted.<\/p>\n In reality, however, most inmates are left on tenterhooks in solitary confinement for years — and sometimes decades — severe consequences for their mental health.<\/p>\n ‘Cruel’ Method<\/strong><\/p>\n Hanging has been Japan’s sole execution method for around a century-and-a-half.<\/p>\n Convicts are led to the gallows blindfolded, with their feet and hands cuffed.<\/p>\n A trapdoor opens below them when several prison officers each press a button simultaneously in an adjacent room.<\/p>\n None is told which button triggers the deadly mechanism.<\/p>\n Three death-row prisoners sought an injunction against the method in 2022, calling it cruel.<\/p>\n Critics have argued that hanging is prone to botched executions and makes for an agonising death, although the Supreme Court has repeatedly ruled the method isn’t cruel.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n According to the court, capital punishment can only be considered cruel if done by “burning, crucifixion, decapitation or boiling”.<\/p>\n Recent Executions<\/strong><\/p>\n More than two years have passed since Japan’s last execution — reportedly the longest hiatus since 2007, when the justice ministry began disclosing names of those hanged. \u00a0<\/p>\n The last hanging, in July 2022, was of Tomohiro Kato, who killed seven people in 2008 when he rammed a truck into pedestrians in Tokyo’s Akihabara district and then went on a stabbing spree.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n The high-profile executions of the guru Shoko Asahara and 12 former members of the Aum Shinrikyo doomsday cult took place in 2018.<\/p>\n Aum Shinrikyo orchestrated the 1995 sarin gas attacks on Tokyo’s subway system, killing 14 people and making thousands more ill.<\/p>\n The death penalty of Shinji Aoba, 46, whose 2019 arson attack killed 36 people at an anime studio, was finalised in January when he withdrew his appeal.\u00a0<\/p>\n <\/p>\n ‘No Warning’<\/strong><\/p>\n There is widespread criticism of the system and the government’s lack of transparency over the practice.<\/p>\n Inmates are often informed of their impending death at the last minute, typically in the early morning before it happens.<\/p>\n Some “may be given no warning at all”, rights group Amnesty International once said in a report.<\/p>\n The psychological pain of not knowing when they will be put to death prompted two prisoners to file a lawsuit against the late-notice system in 2021.<\/p>\n No family members are allowed to witness the inmates’ last moments.<\/p>\n Still, so little information is disclosed about the system that “the public is deprived of the fundamental basis on which to form their opinions”, a group of lawmakers, legal experts and crime victims said in a report in November.\u00a0<\/p>\n One possibility, the group said, is to retain the system itself but suspend its implementation pending a further review.<\/p>\n “This is exactly what South Korea decided to do, and to date, the country isn’t grappling with the rise in heinous crimes,” it said.\u00a0<\/p>\n (This story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)<\/i><\/p>\n Tokyo: Capital punishment in Japan is under scrutiny again after the world’s longest-serving death row prisoner, Iwao Hakamada, was awarded $1.4 million in compensation this week following his acquittal last year in a retrial. Stakes for wrongful convictions are high in Japan, where the death penalty has broad public support despite international criticism over how […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1105,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"tdm_status":"","tdm_grid_status":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[19],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1104","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-world-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gunnewsusa.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1104","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gunnewsusa.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gunnewsusa.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gunnewsusa.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gunnewsusa.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1104"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/gunnewsusa.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1104\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1106,"href":"https:\/\/gunnewsusa.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1104\/revisions\/1106"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gunnewsusa.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1105"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gunnewsusa.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1104"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gunnewsusa.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1104"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gunnewsusa.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1104"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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