The following is a guest post by Sayuri Umeda, a senior foreign law specialist at the Law Library of Congress. Sayuri has previously written blog posts on “Cambodian Law – Global Legal Collection Highlights“; “English Translations of Post-Second World War South Korean Laws“; “Laws and Regulations Passed in the Aftermath of the Great East Japan Earthquake“; and “Japanese Family Law – Global Legal Collection Highlights.”
In September 2014 I wrote a Global Legal Monitor (GLM) article titled Japan: Supreme Court Strikes Down Sentence by Lay Judges in which readers were introduced to a controversial Japanese Supreme Court judgment. (Heisei25(a)689 (S. Ct., 1st petit bench, July 24, 2014) [in Japanese].) The case involved the parents of a toddler who were found guilty of causing her death by physical abuse. The prosecutor requested 10 years of imprisonment for each parent in conformity with sentences previously applied in similar cases.
The district court panel, which included six lay judges