Capital Punishment

Paper Summary:

This paper explains that the United States and Japan are the only highly advanced industrialized countries that have retained capital punishment. The author points out that Japan has a death penalty but uses it sparingly, executing two or three prisoners a year; many Japanese psychologists agree that the death penalty provides a psychic release from the pressure and degradation of conformity, repression and overwork and is an effective tool for instilling fear in police interrogations. The paper relates that the death penalty in these countries is approached differently: The United States, through its constitutional rights, has facilitated a plethora of information to support or abolish the death penalty; whereas, Japan offers minimal information about this issue to the general public.

Table of Contents
Japan: The Death Penalty
Abolitionists of the Death Penalty
United States: Capital Punishment

From the Paper:

"As previously mentioned, Japan does support capital punishment. "The Japanese Penal Code lists 13 crimes that identify the death penalty as an appropriate sanction, and an additional five are sited in other statues." The Prime Minister's Office reported that a survey has revealed that almost 80 percent of people polled nationwide, up from 74 percent in 1994, expressed approval for Japan's continuation of the use of capital punishment. The figure is an all-time high among six such polls conducted since 1956. Results of the poll, which were conducted after a five-year lapse and covered 5,000 men and women aged 20 years or older, also showed that support for scrapping the death penalty has dipped to a mere 8 percent. This is the first time the figure has fallen below the 10 percent mark."

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