After helping deliver prison sentences Friday to two U.S. servicemen guilty of rape, lay judges in a high-profile trial in Okinawa said they suppressed personal emotions to keep their judgment unclouded by anger toward the U.S. military bases in the prefecture.
"The defendant is punished not because he is a U.S. soldier. If he is punished more severely than a Japanese person who has committed the same crime, that would be discrimination by race or nationality," lawyer Tetsu Amakata said on Feb. 27 as he presented a closing argument while citing precedents.
On Friday, a panel of three professional and six lay judges at the Naha District Court handed a 10-year prison sentence to Christopher Browning, 24, a U.S. Navy seaman, and a nine-year term to Skyler Dozierwalker, 23, a petty officer 3rd class, for raping and injuring a Japanese woman in her 20s in Okinawa last October.