JAPAN. MAN SENTENCED TO DEATH FOR NARA SCHOOLGIRL MURDER

the Nara District Court in Japan handed down the death penalty to Kaoru Kobayashi, convicted of murdering 7-year-old schoolgirl Kaede Ariyama after kidnapping her on November 17, 2004. Kobayashi was handed the death penalty after being convicted of abducting the victim with the intention of sexually assaulting her, then drowning her and dumping her body.
It is extremely rare for the death penalty to be applied in cases with only one victim, or when robbery it not involved and the defendant has no past record of murder, but the court sided with prosecutors' demand for the death penalty, taking into consideration the brutality of the crime and the feelings of the victim's family.
Presiding Judge Tetsuya Okuda started proceedings at the hearing on Tuesday by reading out the reason for the court's ruling, a common procedure when the death penalty is handed down.
The court blasted Kobayashi's motive of abducting the young girl to fulfill his sexual urges, and pointed out the seriousness of the crime, in which Kobayashi drowned the 7-year-old by holding her under water in his bathtub, and then photographed the corpse and e-mailed the picture to the girl's traumatized mother.