Only gallows thought good enough for Japan's arsenic killer

By COLIN DONALD Herald correspondent

TOKYO - Any good witch trial must end in an execution, and Masumi Hayashi, 41, the suspected curry poisoner of Wakayama, will expect nothing less this week when sentencing takes place in the most notorious Japanese murder case for years.

For most Japanese following the trial, anything short of the death penalty would seem inappropriate.

The former insurance saleswoman is accused of murdering four people, including a child, and making 63 others sick at a neighbourhood festival in 1998.

The prosecution, in company with the country's lurid TV crime news shows, alleges she laced the communal pot with arsenic after a squabble with other housewives.

The defiant and abusive Hayashi, also accused of attempting to poison four others - including her husband - in order to claim insurance money, has given the public a spectacle of wickedness sensational enough to take their minds off the country's economic malaise.

The death sentence that will almost certainly be handed down on Wednesday will be seen widely as her just deserts.

In Japan, uniquely among the G8 countries, the pro-hanging lobby has the legal and political establishment solidly on its side.

Last May, a bipartisan group of MPs accelerated a campaign to abolish the death penalty, but their prospects seem slim as they account for only 15 per cent of those in Parliament.

Public debate is muted, and the procedures surrounding the sentencing are shrouded in secrecy and open to human rights abuse accusations.

Amnesty International claims that 39 executions have been carried out since 1993.

About 50 prisoners are awaiting execution in seven special "detention centres" throughout Japan.

Conditions in these centres have been criticised by Japanese and international human rights groups.

Death row inhabitants are prohibited from any outside contact apart from family members and, in some cases, not even them.

Prisoners are isolated in narrow solitary cells monitored by TV cameras 24 hours a day.

They are not informed of their execution until the day it is to be carried out. Executions usually take place on Friday mornings, so surviving any Friday past 9am guarantees at least another week of life.

By tradition, executions are carried out in the parliamentary recess, allegedly to prevent awkward questions being put to the Government.

Death is by hanging, with prisoners being handcuffed and blindfolded over a trapdoor.

The fact that Japan is a generally peaceable society, and that the number of executions is relatively small, might make it seem a candidate for abolishing the death penalty.

But experts on Japan suggest the death penalty has a vital psychological and procedural importance in Japanese law.

Its criminal justice system is heavily weighted towards extracting confessions from alleged criminals, with the vast majority of the accused signing confessions before a murder trial takes place.

Amnesty International Japan says: "Many suspects agree to make statements whose contents are just what the police believe they should be, because they think such admissions are the only way to end their suffering.

"As a result, even though a suspect did not intend to kill, the police statement will say he did. The police create confessions."

Such a device accounts for Japan's high guilty rate, which is 99.8 per cent once a suspect is charged.

Japanese abolitionists are convinced that if the United States were to dispense with the death penalty, its chief Asian ally would follow suit.

But as President George W. Bush oversaw 152 executions in Texas during his period as governor, any repeal in Japan is still a long way away, and will certainly come too late to deliver Hayashi from the noose.