Legal Osaka district court rejects appeal over inmate executed during retrial bid

Today, the Osaka District Court dismissed a lawsuit seeking 16.5 million yen (approximately $112,230) in state compensation filed by three lawyers who had represented a death row inmate executed while his request for retrial was still pending.

The lawyers argued that the government violated their rights as defence counsel and caused them emotional distress by executing their client, a former yakuza member, during the retrial petition process. Although the court acknowledged that "careful consideration is required," it concluded that allowing repeated retrial requests could lead to indefinite delays in carrying out death sentences.

The plaintiffs had represented Keizo Okamoto (formerly Kawamura), a former senior member of an organised crime group, whose death sentence for robbery and murder was finalised in 2004. Okamoto maintained that he had not intended to commit robbery and continued to seek a revision of his conviction. Despite this, he was executed in December 2018 during the submission of his fourth retrial request.

The plaintiffs claimed that the central government was liable for "obstruction of proof." The state refuted this by citing the Code of Criminal Procedure, which specifies that "a request for a retrial does not have the effect of suspending the execution of a sentence." It expanded on its counterargument, saying, "There is no legal obligation to refrain from executing an individual during a request for retrial, and it does not constitute a violation of the right to counsel." The practice of waiting to execute death row inmates awaiting retrial occurred for some time after World War II, taking the possibility of wrongful convictions into consideration. However, criticism over "life extension" grew as many death row inmates began to request retrials. The execution of a death row inmate awaiting retrial in 1999 was the single outlier until 2017, when a series of executions were carried out.

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Kana Sasakura, a professor at Konan University and an expert on the death penalty, offered the United States' protocol for these situations: death row executions are put off until the court reaches a final verdict if there is a motion that constitutes a request for a retrial.