June 27, 1949 - Norio Nagayama
His case became a cornerstone of Japanese legal history: the Supreme Court's 1983 ruling on his sentence established the benchmark still used today when determining whether the death penalty applies. Nagayama killed four people over the course of several weeks in 1968, when he was eighteen, and spent the following decades on death row writing fiction that earned him literary recognition abroad even as Japanese writers' institutions refused him membership. The tension between his crimes and his literary output made him a contested public figure, and his execution in 1997 was timed, whether deliberately or not, against the backdrop of another high-profile case involving a juvenile killer.
From Wikipedia
Norio Nagayama (永山 則夫, Nagayama Norio; June 27, 1949 – August 1, 1997) was a Japanese spree killer and novelist.
Biography
Nagayama was born in Abashiri, Hokkaido and grew up with divorced parents. He moved to Tokyo in 1965 and, while working in Tokyo's Shibuya district, witnessed the Zama and Shibuya shootings.
Nagayama killed four people with a handgun between October 11 and November 5, 1968. He robbed the last two victims of 16,420 yen (roughly equivalent in US currency to $46 at the time, or $150 now). He was arrested on April 7, 1969. When he was arrested, he was 19 years old and was regarded as a minor under Japanese law at the time.
The Tokyo District Court sentenced him to death in 1979, though this was overturned by the Tokyo High Court, which imposed a sentence of life imprisonment in 1981. The Supreme Court of Japan reversed the high court's decision in 1983. This ruling is today considered the landmark decision for the application of the death penalty in Japan. The high court on remand subsequently sentenced him to death in 1987, a decision which the Supreme Court upheld in 1990.
In prison, Nagayama wrote many novels and became a public figure. His first published work was Tears of Ignorance (無知の涙, Muchi no Namida) in 1971. In 1983, he was awarded a prize for the novel Wooden Bridge (木橋, Kibashi). The Japanese writing community was uneasy with his success, given his status as a convicted killer. He was rejected by the Japan Writers' Association but did receive recognition in Saarland, Germany in 1996.
On August 1, 1997, he was executed at the Tokyo Detention Center at the age of 48 by decision of Justice Minister Isao Matsuura, just 34 days after the arrest of Seito Sakakibara, the 14-year-old perpetrator of the Kobe child murders. He made no final statement. A foundation to save poor people was established by his will.
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