JAPAN. HIGH COURT UPHOLDS SENTENCE FOR HOUSEWIFE IN CURRY MURDERS

the Osaka High Court in western Japan upheld a death sentence against Masumi Hayashi, a 43-year-old housewife, for murdering four people and poisoning 63 others with arsenic-laced curry served at a summer festival. The court rejected an appeal by Hayashi, a mother of four, who was sentenced to death in 2002 in a bizarre case that gripped the nation and led to a rash of copycat poisonings. Presiding judge Kazuhisa Shirai said Hayashi's testimony was "not reliable at all" and that the court was unable to determine her motive for the murders, which took place in 1998 in Sonobe in Wakayama, 450 kilometers (280 miles) west of Tokyo.
"It is most natural to conclude that she put arsenic into the curry because she was angry at neighbours. But concluding (the motive) is difficult," Shirai said. Hayashi's defense lawyers immediately appealed to the Supreme Court, a court official said. In 2002, the Wakayama District Court sentenced her to death for mixing arsenic into the curry served at the community festival in July 1998, killing two children and two adults and poisoning 63 other residents. Throughout the hearings at the district court, prosecutors were unable to present hard evidence linking her to the deaths and instead relied on circumstantial evidence. They also argued Hayashi poisoned the curry because she became enraged after other women neighbours spurned her for turning up too late to take part in preparing food for the festival. Apart from the curry murders, the housewife was found guilty of three counts of attempted murder, including giving her husband arsenic-laced food in February 1997.