The Canberra Times  Australia 

JAPAN: 'Poison woman' will hang; Efforts to abolish the death penalty in Japan will be too late for convicted arsenic killer Masumi Hayashi, says Colin Donald.

 Any good witch trial must end in an execution, and Masumi Hayashi, the suspected curry poisoner of Wakayama, got nothing less than expected on Wednesday when she was sentenced to death in the most notorious Japanese murder case of recent years. The former insurance saleswoman was convicted of murdering four people, including a child, after lacing curry with arsenic at a neighbourhood festival in 1998. Another 63 people were made ill. 

Prosecutors charged that Hayashi became enraged after being shunned by neighbourhood women and that she added arsenic to the curry when she was alone in the garage where it was being prepared.

 The case set off a media frenzy, with tabloids proclaiming Hayashi the 'poison woman of the era' and television stations devoting hours to detailed live coverage, including numerous dramatic shots of a huge pot of left-over, congealed curry. For the majority of Japanese following the trial, anything short of the death penalty would have been deemed inappropriate. In Japan, support for capital punishment is strong, with the legal and political establishment solidly behind it.

 Last May, a bipartisan group of lawmakers accelerated a campaign to abolish the death penalty, but their prospects seem slim as they account for only 15 % of those in parliament.

 Public debate on capital punishment is muted in Japan, and the procedures surrounding the actual sentencing are shrouded in secrecy and open to accusations of human-rights abuse. According to Amnesty International there have been 39 executions since 1993, and about 50 prisoners are now awaiting execution in seven special "detention centres" (separate from prisons) around the Japanese archipelago. The conditions in these centres have been subject to criticism from Japanese and international human-rights groups. Death-row inhabitants are prohibited from any outside contact apart from family members, and in some cases, not even them. Prisoners are isolated in narrow solitary cells monitored by TV cameras 24 hours a day. They are not informed of their execution until the day it is to be carried out. Executions are usually carried out on Friday mornings, so surviving any Friday past 9am guarantees at least another week of life. After the execution, only the family is told it has taken place; no official announcement is made and media interest is minimal. By tradition, executions are carried out in the parliamentary recess, allegedly to prevent awkward questions to the government. Some executions have been timed to coincide with major criminal cases. The execution of two unnamed men last December, timed to coincide with the sentencing of a man who randomly stabbed 8 children in an Osaka primary-school playground, was all but ignored by the press. Death is by hanging, with prisoners being handcuffed and blindfolded over a trapdoor. The fact that Japan is a generally peaceable society, and the number of executions relatively small, might make Japan seem a candidate for the death-penalty abolition recently adopted in aspirant new EU states and elsewhere. But experts on Japanese governance suggest that the death penalty has a vital psychological and procedural importance in the Japanese law-and-order universe. Japan's criminal-justice system is heavily weighted towards extracting confessions from alleged criminals, with the vast majority of the accused signing confessions before a murder trial takes place.

 According to Amnesty International Japan, "Many suspects agree to make statements whose contents are just what the police believe they should be, because they think such admissions are the only way to end their suffering. As a result, even though a suspect did not intend to kill, the police statement will say that he did. The police create confessions." Such routine accounts for Japan's high conviction rate: 99.8 % once a suspect is charged.

 As Michael Fox, a writer on Japanese criminal law, puts it, "Police are free to verbally abuse suspects from morning to evening for days on end. If threatened with the death penalty, the suspect will usually capitulate and sign a confession. Capital punishment, or rather the fear of it, is a powerful weapon in the hands of the authorities." In criminal trials, the statements taken at the investigation stage are given more weight than the evidence submitted in court. It is rare for the defence to dispute the factual issues in a case, but instead plead extenuating circumstances. Japanese abolitionists are convinced that if the United States were to dispense with the death penalty, their chief Asian ally would soon follow suit. But as the current US president oversaw 152 executions in Texas during his period as governor, any repeal in Japan is still a long way away, and will certainly come far too late to deliver Masumi Hayashi from the noose.