JAPAN. SUPREME COURT ASKS FOR DEATH PENALTY FOR YOUNG KILLER

Japan's Supreme Court asked a lower court to consider the death penalty for a man who was a minor when he killed a young mother and baby girl. The Supreme Court sent back to the Hiroshima High Court its 2002 decision to give life imprisonment to the man, who was 18 at the time of the crime. The age of adulthood is 20 in Japan.
"We do not recognize the decisive reason for the high court to forgo the death penalty" as being his age, the Supreme Court said.
"Life imprisonment is extremely unjust and would go considerably against justice unless it is scrapped," the bench said, calling his crime "cruel, brutal and inhuman."
The defendant, who could not be named because of his age at the time, was convicted of breaking into an apartment where he raped Yayoi Motomura, 23, and strangled her and her 11-month-old daughter Yuka. The district court had given the defendant life imprisonment, saying he could still be rehabilitated.