The Supreme Court on Tuesday turned down an appeal by a man sentenced to death for killing four people in three cases in 2002, including a robbery-murder-arson at the home of the president of Mabuchi Motor Co.
Katsumi Morita, 61, can still file an objection over technicalities, such as an error in the wording of the court's ruling, but the decision is expected to become final.
Lower courts found that Morita, with an accomplice, strangled the wife and daughter of Mabuchi Motor President Takaichi Mabuchi after breaking into their home in Matsudo, Chiba Prefecture, in August 2002 and stealing hundreds of thousands of yen in cash and jewelry. He then set fire to the house. Mabuchi is now chairman of the company.
The two men also killed a 71-year-old dentist in Tokyo that September and the wife of a discount ticket shop operator in Abiko, Chiba Prefecture, two months later in murder-robbery cases.
Justice Itsuro Terada, presiding over the Supreme Court's Third Petty Bench, said in the decision that Morita committed the crimes for money over a period of four months in a cruel and cold-blooded manner.
Morita's lawyers called for reducing the penalty to life in prison during a hearing in October, saying his accomplice, Tetsuo Odajima, acted on his own in some of the crimes without advance conspiracy with Morita.
Odajima, 68, was sentenced to death in March 2007. His sentence was finalized that November when he dropped an appeal.