JAPAN. COURT UPHOLDS DEATH SENTENCE FOR MAN CONVICTED OF KILLING CHILDREN

Japan's Supreme Court upheld the death sentence for Tsutomu Miyazaki, a man convicted of killing and mutilating girls in a series of grisly crimes that horrified Japan in the late 1980s.
Miyazaki, 43, had been found guilty of killing four girls, aged 4 to 7, in 1988 and 1989 in Tokyo's suburbs, and sentenced to death in 1997 by the Tokyo District Court.
Miyazaki burned the body one 4-year-old and left her bones on her parents' doorstep, and wrote letters to the media and victims' families taunting the police. Japanese newspaper reports said he ate part of the hand of one of his victims and drank her blood. In 2001, the Tokyo High Court upheld the earlier court ruling, and it was largely expected that the Supreme Court would follow suit.