The Diet is now debating a bill that would create a system whereby medical doctors and judges would decide together whether someone with a psychiatric disorder who commits a serious crime should be hospitalized.
Although the Justice Ministry in the 1970s and 1980s tried to introduce a system to allow courts to order the hospitalization of mentally ill people who commit crimes, mainly for the sake of public safety, strong human rights concerns forced it to abandon the idea.
But the latest bill appears to have won relatively broad public support, in part due to the outcry over the slaying of eight children at an Osaka elementary school June 8, 2001, by a man with a history of psychiatric treatment.