JAPAN. DEATH SENTENCE UPHELD FOR MAN WHO KILLED 2 IN OSAKA WHILE ON PAROLE

Japan’s Supreme Court upheld the death sentence for Susumu Nakayama, a man who stabbed two people to death in Osaka Prefecture in 1998, seven years after he was released on parole while serving a life imprisonment sentence imposed for a separate murder and robbery case. The top court's third petty bench, led by Justice Yukio Horigome, turned down an appeal from Nakayama, 58, a former builder, against the death sentence which was given by the Osaka District Court in 2001 and was later upheld by the Osaka High Court in 2003.
According to the lower court decisions, Nakayama murdered a plasterer, then 37, and his girlfriend, then 40, on a street in the city of Toyonaka, Osaka Prefecture, on February 19, 1998, over a dispute involving the plasterer's wife who was Nakayama's girlfriend. Nakayama stabbed the two with a kitchen knife and a handmade spear.
In 1970, Nakayama was sentenced to death in a robbery-murder case at the Kochi District Court, but the sentence was reduced to life imprisonment by the Takamatsu High Court in 1973. He was released on parole in 1991 while serving the life sentence.