A Moratorium on Japan’s Death Penalty

The appointment of Keiko Chiba (left), an outspoken opponent of the death penalty, as Japan’s Minister of Justice is a sure sign that the country will immediately slow – or stop – its secretive executions.

From the Times Online:

Keiko Chiba, 61, a lawyer and former member of the Japan Socialist Party, has the final say in signing execution orders for the country’s 102 death-row inmates. Although she has declined to say explicitly whether or not she will authorise them, her 20-year record as an active death penalty abolitionist means that hangings will be put on hold after surging in the past three years.

And from the Telegraph:

The Right-wing Yomiuri newspaper has reacted angrily to Miss Chiba's appointment, saying it would be unreasonable for her to ignore death sentences passed by the nation's courts.

"It is irresponsible and unforgivable if the justice minister – based on his or her personal beliefs – ignores the fact that the nation has a system of capital punishment," the paper said in an editorial.

I wrote a couple of weeks ago about an Amnesty International report on the mental health of Japan’s death row prisoners. Amnesty apparently sees the election of new Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama as an opportunity to bring an end to Japan’s death penalty. Hatoyama surely knew what he was doing when he appointed Keiko Chiba.

This is good news for Japan and for the continued decline of the death penalty around the world – including here in the U.S. In 2007, writing for the majority in overturning the death penalty against juveniles in Roper v. Simmons, Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote that it was appropriate to look to “the laws of other countries and to international authorities as instructive” in interpreting the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment. Every time another country moves away from the death penalty, our obsession with this inhumane, unequal punishment grows more unusual.

More Japan death penalty news: the Independent wrote last week about Sakae Menda, who spent 34 years on Japan’s death row after confessing to a crime he didn’t commit:

"The powerful have the upper hand here," he says. "I went to see the police when I was released, and I asked them how they felt about what they did to me. They told me they were just doing their job."