Japan's Supreme Court dismissed a 49-year-old Miyazaki...

Japan's Supreme Court dismissed a 49-year-old Miyazaki woman's appeal against the death penalty for killing and robbing two women of money before abandoning their bodies in the late 1990s.
''The consequences of killing two people over a relatively short period of time are grave,'' Presiding Justice Tatsuo Kainaka of the top court's No. 1 petty bench said in the ruling. ''The death sentence is inevitable because the victims had no fault of their own, and the crimes were extremely savage and cold-blooded.''
According to the top court ruling, Ishikawa strangled Shizuko Hino, 55, a hotel worker in the city of Miyazaki, with a rope inside a car in Saito in the prefecture and robbed her of about 9,500 yen and a set of golf clubs in August 1996.
Ishikawa also choked Yoko Furuso, her 63-year-old pharmacist friend, to death using her hands at the defendant's home in the city of Miyazaki and withdrew 2 million yen from the victim's bank account in June 1997.
As to motives, the ruling determined that Ishikawa killed Hino because her own family, which ran a carpentry workshop, was experiencing financial difficulties, while she killed Furuso because the pharmacist refused to lend her money.