Capital punishment in Japan

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Capital punishment is legal in Japan as of 2007. As of December 2006, 93 prisoners were on death row.^[1] Four men were executed on December 25, 2006,^[2] one execution was carried out in 2005^[3] and two in 2004.^[4] Between 1946 and 1993, Japanese courts sentenced 766 people to death, 608 of whom were executed. In recent years, the death penalty has been applied only to those guilty of several murders or in cases which combined murder with rape or robbery.^[5]

Contents 1 System 1.1 Stays of execution 1.2 Approval process 1.3 Death row 1.4 Execution 2 Public debate 2.1 Support 2.2 Criticism 3 References 4 See also

[edit] System

[edit] Stays of execution

According to Article 475 of the 'Japanese Code of Criminal Procedure', the death penalty must be executed within six months after the failure of the prisoner's final appeal upon an order from the Minister of Justice. However, the period requesting retrial or pardon is exempt from this regulation. Therefore, in practice, the typical stay on death row is between five and seven years; a quarter of the prisoners have been on death row for over ten years. For several, the stay has been over 30 years (one man died of natural causes at the age of 95, after awaiting execution for 32 years^[6]).

[edit] Approval process

After the failure of the final appeal process to the supreme court, the entire records of trial are sent to the office of prosecution. Based on these records, the chief prosecutor of the office of prosecution compiles a report to the Justice Minister. This report is examined by the officer in the Criminal Investigation Bureau of Justice Ministry for the possibility of pardon and/or retrial as well as any possible legal issues which might require consideration before the execution is approved. This officer is usually from the office of prosecutors. Once satisfied, the officer will write an execution proposal, which has to go through the approval process of the Criminal Investigation Bureau, Parole Bureau and Correction Bureau. If the convict is certified to be mentally incapacitated during this process, the proposal is brought back to Criminal Investigation Bureau. The final approval is signed by the Minister of Justice. Once the final approval is signed, the execution will take place within about a week. By the regulation of penal code section 71, clause 2, the execution cannot take place on a national holiday, Saturday, Sunday, or between December 31 and January 2. The date of execution is kept secret, even to the family of the condemned and the family of the victim. Usually, the executioner will make preparations during weekdays and the execution is performed on Thursday or Friday.

[edit] Death row

Inmates are held at one of seven secure Detention Centres; because they are awaiting execution, those on death row are not classified as prisoners by the Japanese justice system and the facilities they are held at are not referred to as prisons. Inmates lack many of the rights afforded to other Japanese prisoners. The nature of the regime they live under is largely up to the director of the Detention Centre, but it is usually significantly harsher than normal Japanese prisons. Inmates are held under solitary confinement and are forbidden communication with their fellows. They are permitted two periods of exercise a week – reportedly, inmates are not permitted to do even limited exercise within their own cell.^[7] They are not allowed televisions and may only possess three books. Prison visits, both by family members and legal representatives, are infrequent and closely supervised.

[edit] Execution

Executions are carried out by hanging in a death chamber within the Detention Centre. When a death order has been issued, the condemned prisoner is informed in the morning of his or her execution. The condemned is given their choice of the last meal. The prisoner's family and legal representatives, are never informed until afterwards. Consequently, there is no possibility of a final meeting.

Before the condemned prisoner is blindfolded, he or she is allowed to leave the last message if he or she so wishes, then led to the death chamber. The noose is put in place and the prisoner's knees tied together. The trap-door of the gallows is operated remotely from a separate room: three to five selected prison officers each press a switch, only one of which is wired to the trap-door release. Afterwards, the prisoner's family is informed the execution has occurred and they may collect the body. A brief notice of the execution is issued to the media but the identity of the prisoner is withheld – it will only become publicly known if the family chooses to inform the media.

[edit] Public debate

The official policy of secrecy means the execution does not become an "event", which many consider as the main reason for the secrecy. Moreover, Japan is noted for high public support for the death penalty. A survey conducted by the government in 1999, found that 79.3 percent of the public support the death penalty. In 34 polls taken between 1953 and 1999, support for the death penalty has never dropped below 50 percent.

According to Charles Lane of The Washington Post, during the late 1980s, four high-profile acquittals of death-row inmates after retrial "shook public confidence in the system and profoundly embarrassed the Ministry of Justice, which until then had believed that the execution of an innocent person was all but impossible".^[8] Between 1989 and 1993, four successive ministers of justice refused to authorise executions, which amounted to an informal moratorium. Until then, the groups campaigning to end capital punishment were marginal but they coalesced into a single umbrella organization called Forum 90. Unlike in the U.S., where the state's governor or the president can sign pardon, in Japan, the Justice Minister has to sign death warrants. It is not uncommon for a Justice minister not to sign death warrants, some for political or religious convictions, others for personal dislike for signing death warrants. This has caused some debate in Japan, some accusing those justice ministers of neglecting their public duty. For example, Seiken Sugiura, the former Minister of Justice (as of September 2006), publicly stated on 31 October 2005 that he would not sign execution warrants. He said that "From the standpoint of the theory of civilizations, I believe that the general trend from a long-term perspective will be to move toward abolition." Few hours later, he retracted the statement, saying it represented his "feelings as an individual and (the comment) was not made in relation to the duties and responsibilities of a justice minister who must oversee the legal system".

[edit] Support

Polls consistently show overwhelming support for the death penalty amongst the Japanese public - a 1999 survey showed that 79.3% were in favour. At a 2003 trial, a Tokyo prosecutor was able to present the court a petition with 76,000 signatures as part of his case for a death sentence.^[9]

Supporters say that capital punishment is applied infrequently and only to those who have committed the most extreme of crimes—a single act of murder does not attract the capital punishment without additional aggravating circumstances such as rape or robbery. However, the very small number of executions is due to the rarity of extreme crimes in Japanese society rather than because of an unwillingness of the authorities to carry out executions.^[10]

Since executions resumed in 1993, a rise in street crime during the 1990s, the sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway in 1995 and several high profile brutal murders have hardened attitudes amongst the public and the judiciary. Since 1999, there have been a series of cases in which criminals sentenced to life imprisonment have been given the death penalty after prosecutors successfully appealed to the Supreme Court.

[edit] Criticism

Japan and the United States are, in effect, the only developed democracies in which the death penalty is legal and regularly carried out. Amnesty International argues that the Japanese justice system tends to place great reliance on confessions and it has been claimed that these may be obtained under duress. According to a 2005 Amnesty International report:^[11]

"Most have been sentenced to death on the basis of confessions extracted under duress. The potential for miscarriages of justice is built into the system: confessions are typically extracted while suspects are held in daiyo kangoku, or "substitute prisons", for interrogation before they are charged. In practice these are police cells, where detainees can be held for up to 23 days after arrest, with no state-funded legal representation. They are typically interrogated for 12 hours a day: no lawyers can be present, no recordings are made, and they are put under constant pressure to confess. Once convicted, it is very difficult to obtain a re-trial and prisoners can remain under sentence of death for many years."

Amnesty International also reports of allegations of abuse of suspects during these interrogations. There are reports of physical abuse, sleep deprivation and denial of food, water and use of a toilet.^[12] It also criticises the fact that inmates usually remain for years, sometimes decades, on death row, knowing that executions come with little warning and each day may potentially be their last. According to Amnesty International, the intense and prolonged stress means many inmates on death row have poor mental health, suffering from the so called Death row phenomenon. The failure to give advanced notice of executions has been stated by the United Nations Human Rights Committee to be incompatible with articles 2, 7, 10 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.^[13]

South Asia Human Rights Documentation Centre claims that the issue of death warrants by the Ministry of Justice may be politically motivated—in 1997, a prisoner who committed the first of several murders as a juvenile was executed during the sentencing phase of another high-profile juvenile murder trial - an attempt, according to South Asia Human Rights Documentation Centre, to show that the harshest punishment could be administered to juveniles.^[14]

[edit] References

• ^ Japan Executes Four Prisoners on Christmas Day. Yahoo News. Retrieved on January 4, 2007.
• ^ Annual Report 2006. Amnesty International. Retrieved on May 28, 2006.
• ^ Urgen Action in Focus, August 2005. Amnesty International. Retrieved on May 28, 2006.
• ^ Japan Hanging on to Death Penalty. South Asia Human Rights Documentation Centre. Retrieved on May 28, 2006.
• ^ Charles Lane - Why Japan Still Has the Death Penalty. Washington Post. Retrieved on June 7, 2006.
• ^ Bruce Wallace - Awaiting Death's Footsteps. Los Angles Times. Retrieved on June 7, 2006.

[edit] See also

• Criminal justice system of Japan
• Judicial system of Japan
• Human rights in Japan
• Criminal punishment in Edo-period Japan