the Japanese Supreme Court upheld the death penalty imposed on a man who was

the Japanese Supreme Court upheld the death penalty imposed on a man who was convicted of abducting, raping and murdering a college student by burning her alive in January 2002. Judicial experts said it is unusual that the highest court endorsed a death sentence on a defendant without previous murder records in a homicide case which was motivated for nonfinancial purposes and involved only one victim. Justice Yuki Furuta, the presiding judge of the case at the top court's No. 2 petty bench, said defendant Junya Hattori, 36, acted cruelly in that he poured home-heating oil on a still-conscious victim and burned her to death. According to the 2005 decision by the Tokyo High Court, Hattori abducted the junior college student, aged 19 at that time, from a street in Mishima, Shizuoka Prefecture, late at night on Jan. 22, 2002. He abducted her in his car and raped her. Later, he poured oil over her and set her alight with a cigarette lighter in a mountainous area. In January 2004, the Numazu branch of the Shizuoka District Court sentenced Hattori to life imprisonment, rejecting the prosecution's demand for a death penalty.