Japanese Support for the Death Penalty Grows

by Matt Kelley · 2010-02-09 06:24:00 UTC
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Official support for the death penalty may be waning in Japan, but still, the people don't want to let the policy go.

A new Japanese government survey found that a record 85.6% of Japan's population supports capital punishment for murder. This is a jump of four percentage points from 2004 and, surprisingly, comes at a time when the Japanese death penalty could finally be on its way out.

The current center-left government took power in September, and since then, no executions have been carried out (there are 102 people on death row in Japan). Shortly after Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama took office, he appointed Keiko Chiba, an outspoken opponent of capital punishment, as the country's top justice minister.

So what's going on? Is the overwhelming public support for capital punishment a reaction to the slowdown in executions?

Survey respondents said they supported capital punishment for just the reasons you'd expect: deterrence and retribution led the list. Like the U.S., Japan is still clinging to capital punishment -- making the two countries the only major industrialized nations in the world that still support the death penalty. Public support for the death penalty in the U.S. has stayed flat at 65 percent (though, as I've recently written, there are cracks hidden in that data) for some time now.

Perhaps as Japan's brand-new jury system matures, the public will become aware that the country's 99% conviction rate and 90% confession rate could be hiding some wrongful convictions. The percentage of people on Japan's death row suffering from mental illness has skyrocketed in recent years as well.

It's time for the death penalty to go, and one by one, the nations of the world have been expressing themselves by abolishing the practice. What makes voters in the U.S. and Japan so different?

Via Sentencing Law & Policy.

Photo Credit: kanjiroushi

Matt Kelley is the Online Communications Manager at the Innocence Project and a graduate of the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University. Follow him on Twitter @mattjkelley.
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