The Tokyo District Court on Tuesday convicted a married couple of the 2021 murder of an 18-year-old high school girl in Yamanashi Prefecture.
The court sentenced Shohei Komori and his wife, Izumi, to 23 and 18 years in prison, respectively, for the abduction and murder of the Tokyo girl, who was strangled with a rope and stabbed several times in the back with a knife at a storage shed.
The court found their acts "brutal and well-planned." Presiding Judge Takenobu Someya said Shohei Komori had developed an obsession with the girl, whom he met on social media, and killed her out of fear of police finding out that he had abducted her.
The court judged that Izumi Komori, 30, had gone along with her 29-year-old unemployed husband from Gunma Prefecture in the crime due to her psychological dependence on him.
But the court rejected her defense team's claim that she was in a state of diminished capacity.
While she had a psychological dependence disorder, its influence on her behavior was limited and she was mentally competent at the time of the crime, the court said.
According to the ruling, the couple conspired to send messages to the girl's cell phone and abducted her on Aug. 28, 2021, after luring her into a car at a parking lot in Tokyo.
She was murdered two days later in Yamanashi.
A lawyer representing the girl's parents said at a news conference following the ruling that her life had been "treated too lightly."
Prosecutors had sought 25- and 22-year prison sentences for Komori and his wife, respectively.
The father of the victim, who had been allowed to make a statement earlier in court and had requested the death penalty, was present in the courtroom Tuesday and shouted out that the sentence was "too light" immediately after it was delivered.