Station killer's sentence upheld

The Supreme Court on Friday upheld the death sentence for Yasuaki Uwabe, a truck driver who killed five people and injured 10 others in a 1999 stabbing spree at JR Shimonoseki Station in Yamaguchi Prefecture.

The court's Second Petty Bench rejected an appeal by the 44-year-old Uwabe, whose defense team claimed he was not mentally competent at the time of the crime.

In handing down the ruling, the bench, headed by Justice Isao Imai, ruled that the defendant was "neither mentally incompetent nor with diminished capacity."

"The defendant gave in to despair about his future, blamed society and his parents for having placed him under such circumstances and planned to commit an indiscriminate massacre to shock them," the court ruled.

Uwabe drove a rented car into the railway station, hitting a number of people, on Sept. 29, 1999. He then started stabbing people on a station platform, the bench said.

It ruled that Uwabe bears grave criminal responsibility because his actions were premeditated and the massacre had a huge effect on society.

In considering the wish for retribution by the victims' families, the bench ruled that a capital sentence was inevitable.

During his first trial at the Shimonoseki branch of the Yamaguchi District Court, psychiatrists submitted two conflicting reports on Uwabe's mental condition.

One insisted that he suffered paranoid delusions and thus had diminished capacity to make sound judgments, while the other said he had no significant mental disorder.

An additional examination, conducted during the appeal trial at the Hiroshima High Court, judged that Uwabe feared interacting with others and suffered paranoid delusions, but the disorders did not have a direct impact on his crime.

During Supreme Court sessions, defense lawyers compared the case with the stabbing spree in Tokyo's Akihabara district in June that left seven people dead.

They argued that their client was mentally incompetent because he showed no sign of remorse after the crime, unlike the man arrested in the Akihabara killing spree.(IHT/Asahi: July 12,2008)