The Supreme Court on Tuesday threw out a life sentence for a 25-year-old man convicted of the 1999 murders of a woman and her infant daughter, and ordered the Hiroshima High Court to rehear the case with an eye to sentencing the killer to hang.
The top court ruled that just because the killer was a juvenile when he murdered Yayoi Motomura, 23, and her 11-month-old daughter in Hikari, Yamaguchi Prefecture, was not necessarily sufficient cause to spare his life.
This is the third time since records started being kept in 1966 that the Supreme Court has rejected a lower court's life sentence for a defendant whom prosecutors wanted executed and sent the case back to the lower court.