A 33-year-old woman was sentenced Tuesday to 5 1/2 years in prison for physically abusing her 7-year-old daughter, who died last July.
The Nagoya District Court also sentenced her 30-year-old husband, who was not the girl's paternal father, to seven years for abuse.
According to the court, Tomoko Takeda started abusing her daughter, Azumi Suzuki, around April 2001 together with her then live-in boyfriend and current husband, Katsuhiko Suzuki.
On one occasion, Azumi was bound with a rope and left for four days. She was also forced to bend and stretch several thousand times for such reasons as telling a falsehood.
The girl died July 17, 2001, after Suzuki dropped her on the floor several times.
The mother told the court that she had wanted to impose severe discipline so her daughter would not become a criminal.
Her husband said he had also meant to discipline the girl but now believes his actions were wrong.
The couple's lawyers argued that they had started out inflicting corporal punishment on the girl in a misguided attempt to teach her discipline, but then the abuse escalated, resulting in her death.
Prosecutors had demanded seven years in prison for Takeda and eight years for Suzuki.