Under the lay judge system starting in May, lay judges chosen from among the public will participate in decision-making processes that could result in death sentences.
On June 13, then Justice Minister Kunio Hatoyama, 60, attended a meeting of justice and internal affairs ministers from the Group of Eight nations at a hotel in Ebisu, Tokyo. He returned to his ministry in the Kasumigaseki district in the evening.
While he sat at his desk in his office on the 19th floor of the ministry building, a senior official of the Justice Ministry's criminal affairs bureau handed him three death warrants.
One was for the execution of Tsutomu Miyazaki, then 45, who killed four young girls.
Before signing and putting his seal on the documents, Hatoyama said: "I see. Let's go ahead with these executions."
Earlier that month, just before the indiscriminate June 8 street killings in Tokyo's Akihabara district, Hatoyama had received explanations about the three death row convicts, including their names and scheduled date of execution. He had read the convicts' entire trial records.
"By reading the documents, I was able to fully understand the atrociousness of their crimes, which hardened my view of them. I believed that because they did such horrible things, they should be executed," Hatoyama told The Yomiuri Shimbun in an interview after he left the post.
On the morning of June 17, four days after Hatoyama signed the documents, breakfast was served at 7:25 a.m. as usual to Miyazaki and other inmates on the eighth floor of Building A of the Tokyo Detention House in Tokyo's Kosuge district.
Tomomitsu Niimi, 44, a former leading member of the Aum Supreme Truth cult whose cell was diagonally across from Miyazaki's, noticed soon after breakfast that Miyazaki had been taken to the execution chamber. Niimi has appealed his death sentence to the Supreme Court.
In a letter to Tatsuya Mori, a 52-year-old writer and pen pal, Niimi explained how he realized what had happened. "It was because officials...suddenly began packing Miyazaki's belongings into boxes and placing the boxes on a dolly," he wrote.
A former senior official of the detention center said that on the day of execution, prison officers other than the usual ones who oversee inmates open the cell door and order the convict to come out.
Therefore, most death row convicts realize only at that moment that he or she is going to be executed, the former official said.
On the way to the execution site, a death row convict is told in a waiting room by a division chief in charge of detainees of his or her impending execution.
Japanese confectionaries, fruits and hot tea are served to the convict. The convict can ask for a prison chaplain for religious comfort. In Miyazaki's case, he did not ask for a chaplain until the very end.
The Tokyo Detention House's execution room is divided in half by blue curtains. On an altar near the front wall, a Buddhist statue and a cross are placed. In the rear, a three-centimeter-thick rope is hung, and there is a square footboard with 110-centimeter sides on the floor, which opens with the press of a button.
According to sources, Miyazaki was blindfolded with a white cloth and his execution was implemented calmly.
At 11 a.m. on the day Hatoyama announced the trio's executions, Maiko Tagusari, who had worked as an attorney for Miyazaki since his high court trial, looked up at the ceiling in a hotel in Taiwan where she was staying on a business trip.
She pondered, "Was it my [professional] misjudgment not to demand a retrial?"
Death row execution sequence
Prior to the trio's June executions, Hatoyama ordered executions of three other death-row inmates on Feb. 1, less than two months after another three had been executed in December under his first execution order. This made it obvious that the ministry's stance had shifted to one more actively favoring capital punishment.
Hearing about the February executions, Tagusari thought there was not much time left until the 45-year-old Miyazaki would face execution. "We should rush to file a petition for a retrial," the lawyer thought.
At that point, there were 104 death-row convicts who had yet to be executed.
Death warrants are carried out in the order of the finalized court rulings. However, the cases of prisoners who have applied for a retrial or amnesty normally take a backseat in the sequence.
For Miyazaki, the death sentence was finalized in February 2006, and his death warrant was presumed to be in the middle of the list of those death-row convicts. But there was no telling about the timing as the list included those who had applied for a retrial.
In order to cast doubt on Miyazaki's criminal competency at the time of his crimes, in April, Tagusari acquired Miyazaki's psychoactive drug administration record at the detention center, while requesting a psychiatric examiner to check the record.
When Hatoyama signed his third round of death warrants for four more death-row convicts on April 10, the lawyer believed Miyazaki's turn to be executed probably would come in August, as she deemed the pace of executions to be one round every two months. She thought she "would be able to stop the execution if we'd have applied by then for a retrial by handing to the court the report on Miyazaki's mental competency evaluation, which was to be compiled in July."
Tagusari was not the only one feeling pressured by the ministry's new stance, as proved by the trend since February of a number of death-row convicts filing petitions with courts for a retrial or amnesty.
However, an official of the Justice Ministry says most of the applications for a retrial or amnesty were filed by the condemned just for the sake of postponing their executions. "Many of them failed to present new evidence, or they merely cited exactly the same reasons to apply for a retrial as those already dismissed by courts," the official said.
A lawyer based in the Kansai region with considerable experience in defending death-row convicts told The Yomiuri Shimbun that he had filed ad hoc applications for a fresh trial for death-row inmates.
"I was asked for advice by several inmates, who had gotten panicky after they knew the pace of executions had become faster," the lawyer said. "So I had them apply for amnesty just as a tentative measure until we can gather new evidence."
The increase in the number of applications for retrial or amnesty allowed the applicants to be temporarily removed from the execution list, while moving Miyazaki's execution order upward.
One day in March, a senior official of the Justice Ministry reportedly whispered to Hatoyama, "If you remain the justice minister for the time being, Miyazaki will rise up on the list of candidates [for the executions]."
Playing the system
The Criminal Procedure Code requires the suspension of the execution of death-row convicts who are mentally impaired and do not understand the meaning of their criminal punishment.
In Miyazaki's case, however, he had sent letters to some lawyers, including Yoshihiro Yasuda--known for his leading role in the campaigns to abolish the death penalty in Japan. Miyazaki reportedly asked them in the letters, "Please be a defense lawyer for my retrial!"
The Justice Ministry considered Miyazaki's actions--that he personally requested the lawyers to be involved in a retrial for him--as evidence he understood the meaning of death row and wanted to suspend his execution.
"It made us more convinced that there were no [moral] problems executing him," a ministry official told The Yomiuri Shimbun.
Meanwhile, Tagusari tried to find new evidence for a possible retrial for Miyazaki to fulfill her responsibilities as his defense lawyer. In May, she sent the ministry a document stating she was preparing a retrial petition, but the move did not work.
Another justice ministry official said, "Maybe it's time for us to review the current system, under which executions actually can be suspended if a retrial petition is filed just for the sake of formality."
Postscript to Miyazaki's execution
Two days after Miyazaki's execution, Hiroyuki Shinoda, editor in chief of monthly journal The Tsukuru, received a phone call from Miyazaki's mother.
According to Shinoda, 57, who had exchanged letters with Miyazaki in prison over a period of years, the mother said she had seen Miyazaki's body and asked the detention center to take care of her son's mortuary needs. She also said to Shinoda, "I want to put an end [to all of this]."
Meanwhile, Norimichi Sato, a former deputy inspector of the Saitama prefectural police who had been in charge of Miyazaki's criminal interrogation, toured the crime scenes by car on the day following Miyazaki's execution.
Visiting the sites, including those in Kawagoe and Hanno cities in Saitama Prefecture, and in then Itsukaichi (now part of Akiruno), in western Tokyo, the 67-year-old retired investigator prayed for the four young girls who Miyazaki murdered mercilessly.
"Would you please take off my blindfold, as I wish to have a look once more at the face of my chaplain [whom I hold in reverence]," said Kiyotaka Katsuta, then 52, to a prison officer when entering the execution room at the Nagoya Detention House on Nov. 30, 2000.
In response, the prison officer took the blindfold off Katsuta to enable him to be face to face with his chaplain, a Buddhist priest.
While the priest recited Hannya Shingyo [the Wisdom Sutras], Katsuta, who had changed his surname to Fujiwara after being convicted, gave out one by one the names of all the people he had killed.
He said, "I'm sincerely sorry," according to detention house sources.
He subsequently was blindfolded again on the scaffold and his ankles bound up.
A few seconds after a thick rope was wrapped around his neck, the trapdoor beneath his feet opened with a loud sound, according to the sources.
During the period from 1972 to 1977, Katsuta strangled five women in their 20s and 30s after sneaking into their homes to rob them of money and other valuables.
In addition, he shot three others to death before 1984 while committing robberies using a handgun that he had seized from a police officer, sending a shock wave through society.
In a 1994 decision, the Supreme Court upheld the high court's imposition of the death penalty on Katsuta, saying his offenses were "premeditated and extremely heinous, ruthlessly brutal, leaving no room at all for discerning that he respected the lives of human beings."
Minutes before the execution by hanging, Katsuta wrote a will.
"Looking back on the series of crimes I committed, I feel it cannot be helped that I have been informed of my hanging so suddenly, as I now can say I have managed to lead myself to a spiritual state of resignation," Katsuta wrote.
A member of one of the bereaved families of Katsuta's murder victims was cited as saying the report of his hanging "has made us feel we at long last have become able to close a chapter in our anguish, although we still feel never able to forgive the perpetrator."
Law-stipulated punishment
The Penal Code stipulates the death penalty must be "executed by hanging."
The condemned is made to stand on a trapdoor at the center of the execution room, and then a rope is placed around his neck.
Three prison officers in a separate room simultaneously push execution buttons, one of which opens the trapdoor. There is another officer in charge of keeping the rope from swinging due to the downward impact of the prisoner on the gallows.
The condemned person's neck snaps due to the fall, the sources said.
The prisoner's breathing stops immediately, but the heart continues beating for some time.
According to a medical doctor who has witnessed several executions, the heart stops beating an average of 15 minutes after hanging. "The condemned person is rendered unconscious the moment of hanging, and there can presumably be no time of feeling any pain," the doctor said.
The trapdoor is about four meters above the floor beneath the gallows. After the hanging, a doctor listens to the prisoner's heartbeat with a stethoscope, using a stepladder to reach the height of the chest of the hanged.
When the doctor declares the prisoner's heart has stopped, the execution process officially concludes.
The body of the hanged is then toweled off before being dressed in white.
Although the body has bruises around the neck, it is free from any other injuries or bleeding, the doctor noted.
The current form of trapdoor-style hanging dates back to 1873, the sixth year of the Meiji era, when a government ordinance to that effect was put into force.
In the era's early years shortly after the Meiji Restoration, other forms of execution existed such as beheading, but the form of execution was limited to hanging with the revision to the now defunct Penal Code in 1882, or the 15th year of Meiji.
A French legal adviser to the Meiji government, Gustave-Emile Boissonade, who helped with the law revision, characterized hanging as "humane" compared to other forms of capital punishment.
Compared with such execution methods as beheading, Boissonade said, the head and other parts of the body of a person subject to hanging could be prevented from being severed, and his or her relatives claiming the body would have a lesser degree of sorrow.
In 1955, the Supreme Court said in a ruling referring to the death penalty by hanging, "In comparison to other forms of the death penalty employed by other countries, such as beheading, firing squad, electrocution and execution by gas, hanging cannot be considered cruel from a humanitarian point of view."
That top court decision has since been regarded as the legal foundation for maintaining the death-by-hanging system.
Hanging truly 'humane'?
"Honestly speaking, I have a feeling that a more humane, reposeful way of execution than hanging may be desirable," said Kunio Hatoyama at a session of the House of Representatives Judicial Affairs Committee in October 2007, when he was justice minister.
In the United States, where the use of electric chairs and gas chambers were prevalent for years, lethal injection has become widespread since the 1980s as a more humane way of administering the death penalty with minimum pain.
Currently, 35 of the 36 U.S. states that maintain the death penalty have adopted the lethal injection method.
Japan's Justice Ministry, for its part, has never reconsidered continuing its current approach.
An expert in the death penalty system, Yoshiyuki Saito, professor emeritus of Chiba University, said, "The government should be well aware of its responsibility to think always about what form of death punishment should be considered the best in terms of minimizing the pain of the condemned."
The government should set up a panel, including outside experts, to study whether hanging can truly be considered the best method of execution, he said.
"Whenever I heard the footsteps of detention center officers approaching, I'd clench my teeth and listen so that I'd know which cell they were stopping at. It felt like I was tied up and couldn't move until I knew it wasn't me they were coming for," said Sakae Menda, a former death-row inmate who spoke recently with The Yomiuri Shimbun.
Menda, 82, spent more than 30 years in prison for a robbery-murder before becoming the first death-row inmate in Japan to be acquitted at a retrial.
Menda was arrested in 1949 as a suspect in a 1948 robbery-murder in Kumamoto Prefecture. His death sentence was finalized in 1952 by the Supreme Court, after which he says he spent more than 30 years with the prospect of death looming over him.
Under the current system, death-row convicts are informed of their executions in the morning, about one hour before they are due to be taken from their cell to be executed.
On the day, inmates are allowed to write farewell notes or smoke a cigarette, but are not allowed to cause extended delays as the whole execution process is timed to the minute.
Death warrants can be carried out on any weekday except national holidays and the New Year period under a law regulating the management of criminal facilities and the treatment of inmates.
Writer Otohiko Kaga met death-row inmates while working as a medical officer at Tokyo Detention House in Kosuge, Adachi Ward, Tokyo.
"I remember on the morning of an execution, the inmate's cells would be silent," said Kaga, 79. "It wasn't a normal silence. There was a strained atmosphere, with all the other inmates listening to what was going on."
One doctor who worked at a detention house said he heard a staff member at a detention center say, "We call inmates who complain all the time out from their cells on some errand in the morning, so they think it's their turn to be executed and they'll keep quiet."
Unlike the current system, under which the practice of same-day notification is an unwritten rule, inmates used to be informed of their execution a few days beforehand, at the detention house directors' discretion, until the 1970s.
An article that appeared in the April 13, 1956, edition of the Yomiuri distributed in the Osaka area, reported on how an inmate at Osaka Detention House had spent his last three days after the center's director told him that his petition for amnesty had been rejected.
The report--titled "Shikeishu 'Shikko-mae Goju-san Jikan' no Koe" (A Death-row Convict Gives Voice to His Last 53 Hours)--presented the recorded thoughts of the 38-year-old prisoner, other inmates on death row and the detention house staff. The views were taped secretly by the detention house.
The article included details of a farewell party held at the facility, and a meeting with his sister:
"Day 1: Other death-row inmates hold a farewell tea party. They sing 'Auld Lang Syne' ("Hotaru no Hikari" in Japanese) at the suggestion of the center director."
"Day 2: He asks his elder sister [who came to the detention house to meet him] to open the windows and call his name out at home with his mother around the scheduled time of his execution. They cry together, embracing each other tightly."
Prosecutor-turned-lawyer Tomomi Hirata, 82, remembers an executed man whose interrogation he was in charge of and whom he had been in touch with by mail and through visits.
One day in June 1975, Hirata visited the man in prison at the Osaka Detention House. The inmate, who was scheduled to be executed the following day, requested the visit.
Accompanied by a detention house officer, Hirata and the man ate sushi, the man's favorite food, and they chatted about different issues, including their memories of the interrogations.
At the end of the two-hour meeting, the man said to Hirata with a smile, "Now I'm going to go talk with other inmates."
In the mid-1970s, the practice of letting death-row convicts know their execution date in advance was abolished after some inmates committed suicide after being informed they would be executed a few days later.
Since then, detention houses across the nation have only notified inmates on the morning of the execution day.
U.N. asks for changes
In May last year, the U.N. Committee against Torture issued a recommendation to the government to improve on its practice of informing inmates of their execution so close to it taking place, saying the committee "regrets the psychological strain imposed upon inmates by the constant uncertainty as to the date of execution as prisoners."
However, the government responded, "If death-row inmates were informed of their execution earlier than the day of the execution, it could mentally unsettle them and inflict serious mental pain."
In U.S. states that still use capital punishment, death-row inmates are generally informed several days or even weeks before their execution, giving them time to say goodbye to their families and friends.
Hirata, speaking about the man he had met a day before he was executed, told the Yomiuri: "The man became a Christian in prison. He appeared to be spending his last day in a meaningful way."
Hirata also commented on the current system. "I don't think there would be any harm in giving emotionally stable inmates more notice of their execution," he said. "The government should change the current practice so it can be judged on a case-by-case basis whether someone should be informed on the day or earlier about their execution."
In the small hours of Sept. 3, 2003, Tsuneki Tomiyama, 86, a death-row > convict at Tokyo Detention House, was declared dead in the facility's intensive care unit. The cause of death was given as chronic renal failure.
Tomiyama had continued to protest his innocence, filing two retrial petitions, both of which were turned down. Prior to his death, he had been held in detention for more than 27 years following the finalization of his sentence. For the last 2 years of his life Tomiyama suffered from various ailments, including high blood pressure and arterial hardening.
In 1987, another condemned inmate, Sadamichi Hirasawa, died in prison at the age of 95. He had been convicted in a case involving the defunct Teikoku Bank in which 12 people were poisoned to death in 1948.
7 condemned criminals have died from natural causes in prison. Of the 7, 4 were aged 70 or older and had been detained for more than 10 years before their deaths.
On Dec. 25, 2006, another convict at the same detention facility, Yoshio Fujinami, 75, who was unable to walk due to rheumatism, was hanged by the state--13 years after his death penalty had been finalized.
After being taken to the execution chamber in a wheelchair, Fujinami stood up with the aid of two prison officers and proceeded to the trapdoor at the center of the execution chamber, according to prison sources.
Fear of death
"I never get older...the lapse of time, the ceaselessness." Iwao Hakamada, 72, an inmate at Tokyo Detention House who has protested his innocence ever since his first trial, reportedly repeats such phrases every time his sister, Hideko, 75, visits him at the detention house.
Hakamada began making his desperate remarks soon after his death sentence was finalized by the Supreme Court in 1980.
He was convicted in 1968 of murdering an executive of a miso factory, his wife and their daughter and son in Shizuoka Prefecture in 1966.
After his death sentence was finalized, Hakamada lodged his 1st appeal for a retrial in 1981.
The Japan Federation of Bar Associations took up Hakamada's case, saying there was a "high possibility" the prisoner had been falsely accused. This initial appeal was rejected by the Supreme Court in March this year and his second appeal currently is under examination. Hakamada has been held in detention for 2 months short of 28 years, the 4th-longest period among the nation's 103 death-row prisoners.
"My brother has become mentally deranged due to his fear of execution," Hideko said.
In June, the Tokyo Family Court turned down an appeal to appoint a legal guardian for Hakamada, but based on testimonies given by external doctors, the court has admitted he has been suffering from a condition known as prison reaction.
There currently are nine condemned prisoners who have been in detention for 20 years or more. The longest-serving inmate has been held for 37 years and 10 months.
As to reasons why detention periods are often prolonged in such cases, prison administration sources have cited differences in the way various justice ministers handle the death sentence and the practice of not executing people under sentence of death while they seek a retrial or amnesty.
Legally, petitions for retrial or amnesty are not valid grounds for suspending a prisoner's execution.
In reality however, particularly in the case of petitions for retrial, prison authorities tend to delay executions for fear of killing a falsely charged individual, according to a high-ranking official of the Justice Ministry.
The official said: "Some death-row inmates become physically ill or suffer from mental disorders while being detained over a long period. In some cases, inmates die from illness or old age before they can go to the gallows."
Currently, 50 prisoners are waiting to hear the outcome of their retrial petitions. "The longer it takes to screen a retrial petition, the longer it takes for an execution to be carried out," an appeal lawyer said. "Though there are many negative effects relating to long-term detention, these are still preferable to the death penalty," the lawyer added.
Ministry open to criticism
In contrast to the tendency to prolong periods of detention, there recently have been several cases in which executions have been carried out swiftly.
For instance, Mineteru Yamamoto, 68, was hanged at Osaka Detention House on Sept. 11. This was a relatively quick turnaround given that his first trial for murder and robbery was about two years and eight months earlier.
In light of the looming introduction of the lay-judge system, the Osaka District Court was reportedly keen intent to expedite proceedings in the Yamamoto case, handing down a ruling only two months after the start of the trial. Further, the accused voluntarily withdrew an appeal against the death sentence.
"There's no denying that appeals for retrial and amnesty have been used to delay the administering of the death penalty," a former bureau chief of the Justice Ministry said.
"But given that retrial and amnesty appeals are part of the country's legal system, it's inevitable that death-row convicts use these processes. This prolongs detention time--a situation that runs counter to the principle of executing the condemned within an appropriate time frame," he added.
"The Justice Ministry, however, also must bear some responsibility for the current situation," the former bureau chief said.
"I think my number's up," said a death-row inmate to an elderly chaplain holding a Bible as they sat in a prayer room in a corner of a detention house, a Christian cross hanging above them.
The inmate spoke of his fears at a time when the pace of executions of death-row convicts had quickened under then Justice Minister Kunio Hatoyama. Even those whose death sentences had been finalized after his had already gone to the gallows.
The man had committed a heinous crime--multiple murder carried out due to a grudge.
Over the years, the chaplain had slowly convinced the inmate that revenge is wrong.
"I wouldn't be here if I'd realized that before," the inmate was quoted by the chaplain as once telling him. The priest took the comment as an indication of his repentance.
"I only wish he'd encountered Christianity before committing his crime," the chaplain said ruefully.
Caring for convicts a tough job
An elderly Buddhist priest said he still remembers a telephone call he received about 10 years ago from a senior official at a detention house.
"We'll execute him tomorrow," the official told him, referring to an inmate the priest had talked to on many occasions. "Please don't tell anyone this news, not even your family members."
The death-row inmate to be executed the following day had committed many robberies and murders.
Despite speaking with the man for many years, the priest remained uncertain whether the inmate had truly reflected on his past conduct.
The next morning, the man arrived at the waiting room to the gallows.
"Good," the man said as he took a sip of sake that was offered at the Buddhist altar in the room. But at that moment, the priest saw that the man's hand, which was holding the cup, was shaking.
Shortly before the execution, the man suddenly hugged the priest, and he felt the inmate's body tremble.
Though the priest said he had memorized some final words he wished to say to the inmate, which stretched to two sheets of 400-letter writing paper, he felt he could not afford to spend time delivering them.
He was still patting the inmate on the back to comfort him when the curtain to the execution chamber opened. The man was taken from the priest and led toward the trapdoor.
Chaplains are usually not allowed to see the moment of execution.
"I still think I would like to have stayed with him until the last moment," the priest said.
Important roles
Chaplains are the only civilians who are allowed to visit condemned inmates without being separated from them by the acrylic divider in the interview room. About 1,700 chaplains meet inmates as volunteers at detention houses and prisons across the country.
Chaplains urge most inmates at prisons to improve and correct themselves through religious services in preparation for their eventual return to society. However, at their meetings with death-row inmates, held about once a month, chaplains can try only to help the condemned accept death with equanimity.
"When serving a chaplainship at most prisons, there's hope that an inmate can be reformed. On the other hand, it gets me down when I go to the detention house and meet condemned inmates for whom I can have no such hope," a chaplain said.
Another chaplain said he never bids farewell to death-row inmates with "until next time" when leaving an interview room.
"They may be executed before our next meeting," he said. "We shouldn't give them false hope."
Death-row inmates are allowed to speak with the chaplain of the religion they follow.
The Tokyo Detention House, where 13 chaplains meet 50 condemned inmates, for instance, pays attention to balancing the religious services provided, with seven chaplains providing a Buddhist service, four for Christianity and two for Shintoism.
"It's difficult to rely solely on prison officers to maintain condemned inmates' peace of mind and help them reflect on their crimes, so we sometimes need the help of religious services," said Satoshi Tomiyama, of the Justice Ministry's Prison Service Division. "In this respect, chaplains play an important role."
Ashes received by chaplains
On the day a death-row convict is scheduled to be hanged, the chaplain accompanies the inmate to whom they had privately given religious teachings until shortly before the execution.
The detention house chooses a chaplain for those who have not received one-on-one teachings. They are asked to stand by and give words of comfort if requested to by the inmate.
After the execution, the chaplain conducts a simple funeral service at the mortuary in the detention house.
In a corner of the Zoshigaya Cemetery in Toshima Ward, Tokyo, stands an ossuary for former inmates of the Tokyo Detention House. It houses the ashes and bones of executed inmates that were refused by relatives.
"Even though he committed an unforgivable crime, I wish he had at least had a funeral service and been buried the same way as others," said a chaplain who conducted a funeral service for one inmate.
Some chaplains reportedly take with them the remains of the executed if their relatives are not willing to do so and bury them in graves at their temples and churches.
Source:
apjjf.org, David McNeill and Yomiuri, November 1, 2008
