Yoshihiro Yasuda (安田 好弘 Yasuda Yoshihiro, born 1948) is a famed and controversial lawyer in Japan who is known for his anti-death penalty activism in Japan. The main reason why he took part in controversial trials is that he thought that the suspects were tried unfairly because of mass media's bashing.[1]
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Yasuda was one of the defenders of a Shinjuku bus attacker who killed 6 people in 1980. The attacker wasn't sentenced to death, but he committed suicide in 1997.
Yasuda was one of the defenders for Shoko Asahara, founder of the religious cult group Aum Shinrikyo, which has been accused of various crimes, including the Tokyo subway sarin gas attack. In 1998, during Asahara's trial, Yasuda was arrested and charged with obstruction of the compulsory execution concerning a corporation in which he was an adviser. Some critics pointed out that this accusation was implemented because prosecutors were angry at Yasuda's court tactics to delay the trial as long as possible to avoid the sentence of a highly possible death penalty for Asahara. 1200 lawyers listed as Yasuda's defenders, and Japan Federation of Bar Associations and Amnesty International protested that this accusation was unfair. In 2003 the Tokyo District Court acquitted him of all charges, but the Tokyo prosecutors office appealed the case to a higher court, and the trial is going on as of May 2007.
Yasuda is also a chief defender for a 19 year-old boy accused of the murder of a woman and her 1 year-old daughter in Hikari city, Yamaguchi. This case has received much attention because of the circumstances of the crime and the possibility of imposing the death penalty on a minor (which is age 20 in Japan). In March 2006, Yasuda and his group of attorneys were absent from the oral argument hearing with some reason. The Japanese media have considered that their behavior was to delay the trial just in the same way as during the Asahara trial without considering any lawyer side reasons, and the Supreme Court ordered him to attend the next hearing.