The Chiba District Court has sentenced a 37-year-old man to 17 years in prison after he was convicted of killing a 21-year-old university student in Ichikawa, Chiba Prefecture, last year.
According to the ruling on Friday, Yoichiro Saito, a transport company worker, fatally stabbed Kensuke Iwamoto multiple times in the back and neck at around 11 p.m. on May 10 at the victim’s apartment in Ichikawa. The two were acquaintances.
Saito also poured oil in the apartment and intended to set fire to the place and kill himself but did not go through with it, prosecutors claimed.
The next night, Saito turned himself in at Ichikawa Police Station and confessed to murdering someone. He was carrying a blood-stained knife at the time.
Prosecutors sought a 20-year jail sentence for Saito for the crime which the presiding judge called a frenzied and brutal act.
In calling for a lighter sentence, Saito’s defense team said he was suffering from a mental disorder and bore diminished responsibility for his actions. However, the judge rejected that argument, pointing out that Saito turned himself in, fully aware of what he had done.
© Japan Today
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Thomas Twatt
An unspeakably horrendous crime, needless to say. But if the paragraph quoted above is a full and fair summation of the judge’s position, then he or she betrays a very limited understanding of mental disorders.
TT
Harry_Gatto
If he was " fully aware of what he had done." then he deserves, if not the death penalty, life in jail without any chance of parole.
Mickelicious
The judge's amateur hypothesis (for that's all it is) now enjoys the weight of legal precedent. Shocking.
Thomas Twatt
That argument does not hold. A person may be fully aware of past acts committed, but it does not follow that they were aware at the time those acts were committed or that they intended those acts or their consequences.
If I reverse my car over a sleeping cat I didn’t notice, killing the animal, I may be (after the fact) fully aware of what I’ve done but I’ll be less culpable than I would be if I’d known the animal was there and fully intended to harm it.
TT
stormcrow
I asked a Japanese lawyer about how the death penalty was given in Japan and he told me that it was, for the most part, only given with 2 or more murders by an individual.
One murder will land you in prison for a length of time and two murders (or more) will mean an undisclosed date with the hangman.
Rodney
Good point, he turned himself in giving immediate closure to family and friends.
bad point, Japan doesn’t have forced manual labor like some other Asian countries.
myzen
This article misses important imformation about the reason why defense team insist that the man had mental disorder.
It says "The two were acquaintances" ,but according to another japanese article, they were dating and had sexual relationship. The university student (a man,who had dressed as woman ,dated with Saito and got huge financial assistance from him) said good bye to Saito at the time. And then Saito got depressed.
To make sure, breaking up can't justify any murder.
Michael Machida
First of all, the sentence is way too short. Secondly, this kind of relationship is pre-determined to end bad.
Kenneth Dey
So the girl got a death sentence for doing nothing while her murderer got 17 years for murdering her. Sounds like he got a far better deal than she did.