The Osaka District Court on Thursday marked a historic and welcome first for this country. Three former presidents of the defunct Osaka-based pharmaceutical company Green Cross Corp. were found guilty of professional negligence and sentenced to prison in the case of a hospital patient who died of AIDS-related complications nine years after being infected by an HIV-tainted blood product manufactured and distributed by the company. The ruling handed down by Mr. Mikio Kiyoshi, the presiding judge, was the first time a Japanese judicial authority had held a pharmaceutical company criminally responsible for death or injury resulting from use of one of its products.

Unsuspended prison sentences for criminal defendants who once held such senior executive posts are rare in Japan and testify to the severity with which the judge viewed the company's continued manufacture and distribution of unheated blood products in 1986, despite the fact that safer heat-treated products had become available and the link between unheated products and possible HIV infection was already known. Green Cross also failed to take any steps to recall the unheated products from the market, even placing advertisements that falsely claimed all its blood products were safe.

The longest of the three sentences handed down is for only two years -- entirely too short in the view of many observers, and especially so to relatives of some of the victims of the defunct company's misguided policy of putting market share and profits above the threat to the lives of hemophiliacs and others whose health depended on the safety of their products. The best defense the high-priced legal team representing the former executives apparently could muster was to try to shift the blame for the tragedy to the Health and Welfare Ministry, since it did not instruct the company to recall the unheated products, and to the hospital that treated the patient for its continued use of such products. The court's ruling is a warning against such tactics.