There were no defined lines when it came to sentencing...

There were no defined lines when it came to sentencing a person to capital punishment or life imprisonment, and the decision was largely up to the judge to make, the Japan Federation of Bar Associations (JFBA) said, adding that it could not say for certain whether capital punishment rulings had been handed down without mistakes, given that court decisions had been mixed in the past when it came down to sentenceing, even on equally violent crimes.
''Under such circumstances, the government should suspend executions as it is against justice and imposes unfair results on defendants,'' the group said in the report, which was released at an annual human rights meeting of the federation in the city of Miyazaki, southwestern Japan.
The group picked some 730 criminal cases during the past 20 years, and compared the cases in which death sentences were finalized at the Supreme Court with those in which defendants received life imprisonment or more lenient punishments. In some cases, prosecutors' demands for capital punishment were rejected, resulting in life imprisonment.
The research showed that five cases in which kidnappers sought ransom and later murdered one victim each resulted in the five being sentenced to death in that period. However, eight similar cases ended in life imprisonment.
In murder cases with several victims, judges reached different verdicts, with some defendants facing capital punishment, according to the research.
Courts rejected prosecutors' demands for the death penalty mainly because the crimes were not premeditated or there was the issue of blame on the victims' side, the research showed.
Moreover, the court ''focused on subjective aspects, such as the defendants' unhappy upbringing and their prospects for rehabilitation,'' the report noted, suggesting there were no concrete objective standards for assessing of such cases.
The report presented five cases, in which initial death sentences at lower courts were turned to life imprisonment at upper courts, for reasons such as the possibility of the defendant's rehabilitation, mental problems and an unhappy past, the research showed. On the other hand, the report found five cases, in which life imprisonment sentences were raised to capital punishments at upper courts on grounds that it was unlikely the defendants would be rehabilitated or that they played key roles in violent crimes. Defendants' past criminal records were also cited.
''There must be several cases where defendants were sentenced to death even when they deserved life imprisonment or more lenient punishments. Such misjudgment should be considered injustice and unfair, on the same level as false accusations,'' the report noted.
Based on the findings, the report concluded, ''It is almost impossible to fix the boundary between capital punishment and life imprisonment, and the boundary must be in the judge's sense of value.''