Prosecutors demanded that Mamoru Takuma be sentenced...

Prosecutors demanded that Mamoru Takuma be sentenced to death for killing eight primary school children and wounding 15 others at Ikeda Primary School in Ikeda, Osaka Prefecture, in June 2001. They told the Osaka District Court that the killings were among the most heinous in Japanese criminal history and that the only option was to impose the death penalty. In their closing arguments, prosecutors took the rare step of including statements from the parents of the victims, and urged the court to honour the families' desire to see Takuma severely punished. They said psychiatric tests had shown that Takuma, 39, was mentally competent at the time of the crime. The parents of the eight victims released a statement, titled, "From the Parents of the Eight Angels," after prosecutors demanded the death penalty. The statement said, "The demand for capital punishment is only natural. Even that does not satisfy us, such is our state of mind. To our regret, the defendant did not tell the truth in court? The current criminal justice system neglects the victims. We were not even permitted, on an individual basis, to ask questions about the case."