The Supreme Court has rejected an appeal filed by two ex-presidents of the defunct Green Cross Corp. against a lower court ruling in an HIV contamination debacle, finalizing their guilty sentences.
The decision means Renzo Matsushita, 84, Green Cross president at the time of the fiasco, will serve 18 months in prison and Tadakazu Suyama, 77, then vice president who later became president, 14 months in prison for professional negligence resulting in death as ordered by the Osaka High Court in August 2002.
These are the first verdicts finalized in the trials against the pharmaceutical industry, the government and academia over mass HIV infections.
Lower courts ruled that the two knew that unheated blood products could be contaminated with the virus but continued to distribute them even after the firm began selling safe, heated agents in January 1986. They also did not recall the unheated products.
The courts held the two responsible specifically for the death of a man with liver disease who contracted HIV from unheated Green Cross blood products. He died of AIDS in December 1995.
After the Osaka District Court sentenced Matsushita to two years in prison and Suyama to 18 months in February 2000, they appealed to the high court, seeking to have their sentences suspended.
They acknowledged their negligence but asked the court take into consideration that the former Health and Welfare Ministry had not ordered the firm to recall the products.
In the 1980s, some 1,431 hemophilia patients in Japan contracted HIV from tainted blood products, a 2001 health ministry poll found. More than 500 of them had died by the time of the survey.