Japan executed four convicted killers yesterday, the Justice Ministry announced, amid criticism that the country’s secretive and slow-moving justice system leaves inmates to languish on death row for decades.
Japan, one of the few industrialized nations that still has capital punishment, has boosted the pace of hangings in recent years. The country hanged 15 criminals last year — the most since 1975 when 17 people were executed, Justice Ministry official Katsuhisa Nagata said.
Yesterday, Shojiro Nishimoto, 32, was hanged at the Tokyo Detention Center after he had been convicted on four counts of murder and robbery. He killed three senior citizens who lived alone in separate attacks in April 2004 and a 59-year-old taxi driver in 2003.
Yukinari Kawamura, 44, and Tetsuya Sato, 39, were also hanged.
They had been convicted of kidnapping a coffee shop owner and his wife in the central Japanese city of Nagoya in April 2000, then driving them to a remote forest and burning them to death.
Tadashi Makino, 58, was hanged for stabbing someone to death and assaulting two other people in the southern city of Kitakyushu in 1990.
The rise in executions has triggered strong protests from rights groups, including Amnesty International, although the anti-capital punishment lobby within Japan remains small.
Japan’s bar association opposes capital punishment and has proposed a moratorium on executions. There are about 100 people currently on death row.
Many supporters of capital punishment say it needs to be reformed because condemned criminals are often left waiting on death row for years.
Others criticize the criminal justice system, and executions in particular, as being too secretive. Inmates do not know when they will be executed until the morning of their hanging. Executions are conducted in secret, with lawyers and family only being notified after the fact.
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