AKITA (Kyodo) A life sentence given to a 36-year-old woman convicted of killing her daughter and a neighborhood boy in Akita Prefecture in 2006 has been finalized after she dropped her appeal to the Supreme Court, judicial officials said Tuesday.
Suzuka Hatakeyama dropped her appeal Monday, ending proceedings in the unusual case in which two children were murdered over the period of a month.
Prosecutors, who originally sought the death penalty for Hatakeyama, had earlier given up appealing the sentence, saying they had failed to find a proper reason for appeal by the April 8 deadline.
Hatakeyama expected prosecutors to appeal and became agitated after learning they had decided not to, according to people who visited her, leading her to decide to appeal on her own. She told a clinical psychotherapist last fall, "The worst thing for me is to be sentenced to life because I don't know how long I'll be able to endure it."