Japan on Friday carried out its first execution in nearly three years, hanging a man who had murdered nine people after contacting them through social media.
Takahiro Shiraishi had been sentenced to death for his 2017 strangling and dismembering of eight women and one man in his apartment in Zama city in Kanagawa near Tokyo. He was dubbed the “Twitter killer” as he contacted victims via the social media platform, which is now known as X.
‘Extremely Selfish’
Justice Minister Keisuke Suzuki, who authorised Shiraishi’s hanging, said he made the decision after careful examination, taking into account the convict’s “extremely selfish” motive for crimes that “caused great shock and unrest to society”.
This comes after the July 2022 execution of Tomohiro Kato, who had driven a rented two-tonne truck into a crowd in Tokyo’s Akihabara district and then went on a stabbing spree, killing seven people.
It was also the first time a death penalty was carried out since Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba’s government was inaugurated last October.
In September last year, a Japanese court acquitted Iwao Hakamada, who had spent the world’s longest time on death row after a wrongful conviction for crimes committed nearly 60 years ago.
Old Ways
Capital punishment is carried out by hanging in Japan and prisoners are notified of their execution hours before it is carried out, which has long been decried by human rights groups for the stress it puts on death-row prisoners.
Japan and the United States are the only two members of the Group of Seven industrialised economies to retain the death penalty.
“It is not appropriate to abolish the death penalty while these violent crimes are still being committed,” Suzuki told a press conference. There are currently 105 death row inmates in Japan, he added.
There is strong public backing for capital punishment in Japan, with a 2024 government survey of 1,800 respondents showing that 83% viewed the death penalty as “unavoidable”.
(With inputs from Reuters)
