JAPAN. JFBA LAUNCHES SERIES OF PUBLIC HEARINGS ON DEATH PENALTY

the Japan Federation of Bar Associations, the country's largest lawyers' group, had launched a series of public hearings on its proposal to suspend executions while the Diet debated the use of capital punishment.
At the first hearing in Tokyo, several experts offered their views on the proposal after a special committee under the federation announced its draft bill, which called on the government to set up study panels on the death penalty both at upper and lower houses of the Diet and to suspend executions while the research was underway.
Under the bill, the government would also be required to disclose information on capital punishment so the panels could conduct full research over five years.
Supporting the bill, Tetsuya Takahashi, professor in philosophy at the University of Tokyo, told the hearing that no state had the authority to decide who could live or who could die.
''Execution means a state exercises the authority that does not exist, and such stance of a government leads to totalitarianism or Nazism,'' he said.
Referring to feelings of retaliation by crime victims or their bereaved families against criminals, Takahashi said, ''Their demand to kill criminals brings about another murder, and I do not believe such feelings can be considered as a reason to maintain capital punishment as victims themselves have already died.''
''It might be possible that a victim entrusts a government to execute a possible killer beforehand, but I do not think such a contract will be materialized,'' he added.
Takeshi Tsuchimoto, a law school professor at Hakuoh University, threw doubt over the JFBA's proposal, saying, ''It will make justice or laws insignificant if we do not carry out finalized punishments.''
''Moreover, it will crush hopes of death row inmates if we end up maintaining capital punishment following the five-year research at the Diet,'' said Tsuchimoto, who was a former prosecutor.
He also said, ''We cannot ignore the public sense of justice when we talk about capital punishment,'' referring to survey results that around 80 percent of Japanese support the death penalty due mainly to the feelings of retaliation and deterrence against atrocious crimes.
The Japan Parliamentary League Against the Death Penalty, headed by Shizuka Kamei, a former policy chief of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party, hoped to submit a bill to the Diet to suspend executions and replace the death penalty with life imprisonment without parole.