Hundreds of people gathered on the 12th anniversary of Norio Nagayama's execution, a man hanged for killing four people when he was a teenager.
"It was highly likely that he would have led a life of atonement (if he had not been executed on Aug. 1, 1997), and would have appealed to society so as not to create children like him who turn into juvenile delinquents," Kyoko Otani, one of Nagayama's lawyers, said at the public meeting Saturday in Tokyo.
Nagayama was convicted of fatally shooting four people in 1968 at the age of 19. He came from an extremely poor family, but he had a burning desire to learn following his arrest in 1969. He wrote several influential books while behind bars, including a best-selling autobiography titled "Muchi no Namida" ("Tears of Ignorance").