EDITORIAL: Lay judge death sentence

The first death sentence under the lay judge system was handed down Tuesday at the Yokohama District Court against a man convicted of brutally killing two men and abandoning their bodies.

The accused had pled guilty and said he was prepared to accept his punishment. But condemning a man to death could not have been an easy decision for the judges and citizen judges who deliberated on this case.

This was the second capital case involving citizen judges. In the first, tried at the Tokyo District Court, the accused was sentenced to life in prison this month.

What factors contributed to these different sentences?

The so-called Nagayama standards, set by the Supreme Court, are applied to capital cases as criteria for applying capital punishment. Both the Tokyo and Yokohama cases were tried in light of these standards. But while the number of victims was the same in both cases, the manners in which the crimes were committed were different, as were the motives of the accused and their various circumstances.

We can only conclude that every judge--professional and lay alike--must have reached their decision after scrutinizing every piece of evidence as if their lives depended on it. And that, ultimately, is what a trial is about.

Before the introduction of the lay judge system, we could just leave it to professionals. We might have expressed our horror at some grisly crime or perhaps criticized the court for being too lenient, but we could soon forget the case and get on with our lives.

But the lay judge system has changed this. We must deal with the issue of capital punishment whether we like it or not. There are many people who question the system. Their typical argument is: "Why us? We are just ordinary citizens. We didn't choose to become lay jurors."

Others, however, think it is wrong to leave issues of crucial importance to society to just a handful of professionals, and this thinking helped launch the system. We believe the system represents an attempt to depart from "non-participatory democracy."

Tuesday's verdict should be viewed as one of the outcomes of this effort, as well as a way point in the public's continued participation in the judiciary. The decision carried a greater impact than we could ever feel from facile comments by pundits or casual observers.

One lay judge told a post-verdict news conference of the extreme pressure he had been under. He noted, "Given the present state of our country, I believe it's good for ordinary citizens to participate in trials."

As more people come to share this experience, we feel sure our country will change in the long run. The controversy over whether to abolish the death penalty should involve Diet deliberations and acquire a depth and breadth it has never had.

Notices have just been sent to 310,000 citizens selected as lay judge candidates for next year.

The notices must have reached them by now. If their family members are included, quite a number of citizens must be thinking and talking now about what it means to judge a fellow citizen for his or her crime.

Our fellow citizens, no different from us, made a difficult moral decision Tuesday. We must accept their decision and contemplate deeply on what we ourselves would have done.

--The Asahi Shimbun, Nov. 17