AHC: Abolish capital punishment in Japan

The Vulture

Banned
The death penalty enjoys a fair amount of support in Japan today, but there is a growing vocal minority who oppose it.

The challenge here is to render it illegal through political changes in Japan. Maybe a high-profile case turns the public against it or a different PM takes office.
 
I'm a trifle short on details, but the Democratic Party of Japan-led early 1990's coalition government issued a moratorium on executions. In the event, the moratorium lasted the c. 1 year life of the government. Had the DPJ-led gov. proven durable, the moratorium might have become abolition.
 

The Vulture

Banned
I'm a trifle short on details, but the Democratic Party of Japan-led early 1990's coalition government issued a moratorium on executions. In the event, the moratorium lasted the c. 1 year life of the government. Had the DPJ-led gov. proven durable, the moratorium might have become abolition.

That's a POD with teeth. The real question is whether or not the public would support such a change in policy.
 
I'm a trifle short on details, but the Democratic Party of Japan-led early 1990's coalition government issued a moratorium on executions. In the event, the moratorium lasted the c. 1 year life of the government. Had the DPJ-led gov. proven durable, the moratorium might have become abolition.

It was actually longer than that.

During the early '90s, Megumu Sato, a former Buddhist priest serving as minister of justice, refused to sign execution orders for the year he was in office, citing his religious beliefs.

Sato was one of four ministers who served during a 40-month de facto moratorium on executions that began in November 1989 and ended in March 1993. The moratorium followed a period of increasing concern about capital punishment, both inside and outside the Japanese government. The key events were the exonerations during the 1980s of four death-row prisoners, all of whom had been sentenced to hang in the chaotic period just after World War II and then spent years pursuing appeals.

The exonerations were deeply embarrassing to the powerful Ministry of Justice, which handles all criminal prosecutions in Japan. Ministry officials sincerely believe that such miscarriages of justice are all but impossible under the Japanese system, because prosecutors rarely bring charges unless the defendant confesses and only seek the death penalty in selected cases involving multiple victims, or where murder is combined with rape or robbery. But the exonerations forced the country to acknowledge that several men had been sentenced to death based on confessions squeezed out of them in prolonged custody, that the police had mishandled key evidence -- and that such practices have not disappeared. Amid the soul-searching, the anti-death penalty movement, traditionally marginal, gained strength and coalesced into an umbrella organization known as Forum 90, the first of its kind in modern Japan.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A11306-2005Jan15.html

The MoJ more or less simply promised to do a better job of getting truthful confessions. Then the Aum attacks came along, and combined with rising crime rates people decided it was OK.

Another window may be to have postwar pacifists like Kijuro and Shigeru push for it when writting the constitution with SCAP. Give Shigeru a motive to be open with his Catholicism and that might could serve as impetus.
 
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