JAPAN. DEATH PENALTY UPHELD FOR MAN ACCUSED OF KILLING WIFE, FRIEND

the Supreme Court turned down an appeal from Katsuhisa Cho, a man who was given the death penalty for killing his wife and a friend in the late 1980s. Cho, 40, was sentenced to death at the Utsunomiya District Court in December 2001 for suffocating his 18-year-old wife Chiaki in November 1988 in or around Oyama, Tochigi Prefecture, and for fatally beating his friend Mikio Wada, 26, in November 1989 in Oyama. He was also found guilty in seven injury-inflicting violence cases. The Tokyo High Court upheld the decision in September 2003. Although the defendant was young at the time of the crime, ''The death penalty is unavoidable'' for Cho who lacks respects for human lives, the presiding judge said. Cho, who was arrested in 1996, had pleaded not guilty to the murder and injury charges.