While 80 percent of the Japanese public is in favor of capital punishment, support for executions would drop if life without parole sentences were also an option, according to an American criminologist who visited Tokyo recently.
Such, at least, was the case in the U.S., said professor Kimberly Kempf-Leonard, director of the Center for the Study of Crime, Delinquency and Corrections at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale.
The key is how you ask people their opinion about the death penalty, she contends.