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| Tokyo Detention Center Execution Chamber |
It was shortly after dawn on February 21 when Kaoru Kobayashi was informed that it was to be his last day alive. Officers at the Osaka Detention Centre told the former newspaper delivery man that the justice minister had signed the paperwork to allow his execution to go ahead.
Two other death-row prisoners were hanged the same day. Masahiro Kanagawa, aged 29, had been found guilty of killing one man and injuring seven others in a random knife spree in Ibaraki prefecture in 2008, while 62-year-old Keiki Kano was executed for the murder of a bar owner in Nagoya in March 2002.
At a news conference that day, Justice Minister Sadakazu Tanigaki said: "All these cases involved atrocious crimes that stole precious lives for selfish reasons."
Questioned by reporters, Tanigaki declined to comment on the timing of the executions or why the three men had been chosen from the 130 on death row.
But opponents of the death penalty believe they know why Tanigaki, part of the Liberal Democratic Party that swept back into power in December, signed the execution orders.
"It took the Democratic Party of Japan administration more than a year to make a decision to carry out its first execution, but the LDP has carried out its first executions less than two months after being elected," said Yoshihiro Yasuda, a lawyer and a member of Forum 90, one of a coalition of groups demanding that Japan abolish the death penalty.
"This administration will have no hesitation in carrying out executions and we expect them to take a proactive approach to carrying out the death penalty," Yasuda added.
While the opponents of hanging are fundamentally against the state exercising the right to take a citizen's life, they also express particular concern over a number of cases in Japan in which the death penalty has been handed down to a defendant despite evidence of a miscarriage of justice.
In February 1992, two primary schoolgirls disappeared on their way home in Iizuka city, Fukuoka prefecture. They were found dead the following day.
Two years later, police arrested Michitoshi Kuma on the grounds that he drove a car similar to one seen close to where the girls were abducted (...)
Kuma consistently and vigorously proclaimed his innocence but, in the absence of any direct evidence linking him to the crime, the court decided that the blood and DNA evidence on the bodies of the victims matched that of Kuma and convicted him.
That sentence was finalised by the Supreme Court in 2006 and Kuma was executed on October 28, 2008, still proclaiming his innocence.
The hanging also went ahead just two weeks after the Tokyo High Court prosecutors' office issued a written opinion that DNA evidence used in another murder case was inaccurate and could not be used. Exactly the same method had been used to secure the DNA evidence that convicted Kuma.
In 2009, Kuma's family filed a request for a posthumous retrial and, when the case came to court in 2012, the defence team told the judge that a new DNA test confirmed that the samples did not belong to the victims thought to be those of Kuma.
The defence also presented evidence that part of the DNA images that were presented to the court by the prosecutors had been cut out, the part showing the DNA of the third party.
Source: South China Morning Post, March 25, 2013