The hangings of three convicted murderers on June 17 could not have been more badly timed. Coming so soon after the deadly rampage in Tokyo's Akihabara district, Justice Minister Kunio Hatoyama clearly intended to send a defiant message that he will not flinch from using the gallows to, as he put it, "protect the rule of law."
Unfortunately, his signing of the execution orders showed scant regard for the pathological nihilism of recent random killers and the consequences of offering them (and others) a means to achieve infamy and release from their blighted lives.
As noted in The Japan Times' June 12 editorial " 'Anyone' was a target," perpetrators of a spate of killings this year were indiscriminate in their choice of victims. The police quoted Masahiro Kanagawa, arrested in March after a stabbing spree in Tsuchiura, Ibaraki, as saying, "It didn't matter who they were."
Even more troubling, the 18-year-old assailant arrested for pushing a man in front of a train at JR Okayama station reportedly told police: "I could have attacked anyone. I just wanted to go to prison." His apparent motive was a chilling reminder of the words of Mamoru Takuma, hanged for the killing of eight children at an Osaka elementary school in June 2001, who was quoted as telling investigators: "I got fed up with everything. I wanted to be arrested and executed."
As courts make greater use of the death sentence and more sentences are carried out, there seems to me a genuine danger that the finality of execution, rather than acting as a deterrent, may serve as an incentive for chronically alienated sociopaths to seek ephemeral notoriety in the spotlight of media coverage and commit multiple murders as a way to end their lives.
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