Death row inmate, lawyers seek state compensation

November 12, 20081

HIROSHIMA —

A death row inmate and his two lawyers filed a damages suit against the state Tuesday, arguing it is illegal that the Hiroshima Detention House did not allow him to meet the lawyers privately. While the lawyers visited Shozo Nishiyama, 55, three times at the detention house earlier this year to prepare for his retrial, the detention house rejected their request each time to meet their client without supervision, according to the complaint filed with the Hiroshima District Court.

Claiming they should be guaranteed meetings without supervision, the plaintiffs are demanding that the state pay them 3.3 million yen in compensation. The death penalty against Nishiyama over a murder-robbery case was finalized at the Supreme Court in 2007, though he was once sentenced to life in prison by a lower court.

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Death penalty upheld for '92 murder

Kyodo News
The Supreme Court on Tuesday upheld the death sentence for a 54-year-old man who killed a woman in Fukuyama, Hiroshima Prefecture, in 1992 while he was on parole from a life sentence for murder-robbery.

With the rejection of Shozo Nishiyama's appeal, the total number of inmates on death row is now 103.

The case is one of only three ever in which the Supreme Court has accepted a prosecution appeal for the death penalty and sent the case back to a high court that had originally given a life sentence.

According to the ruling, Nishiyama, who was released on parole in July 1989, killed acquaintance Yasuno Naito, 87, and took her bank book on March 29, 1992, in conspiracy with another man, who was sentenced to life in prison.

Nishiyama was handed a life sentence in 1994 by the Hiroshima District Court, which ruled the crime had not been thoroughly planned and Nishiyama could be rehabilitated. The Hiroshima High Court upheld the ruling in 1997.

But the Supreme Court in 1999 remanded the case to the high court, which subsequently sentenced Nishiyama to death in 2004.

Before this, the Supreme Court has scrapped rulings in two other cases, sending the cases back to a high court. One involved Norio Nagayama, who shot four people to death in 1968, and the other dealt with a youth who killed a mother and her baby in Yamaguchi Prefecture in 1999.