Criminal Trial, Sentence, Illness, and Death
Hiroko Nagata was sentenced to death in the Tokyo District Court on June 18, 1982. On September 26, 1986, the Tokyo High Court upheld her death sentence. On February 19, 1993, the Supreme Court of Japan upheld her death sentence. Nagata submitted a plea for a retrial, which was declined by the courts on November 28, 2006.
Nagata wrote several books during her time in prison and attracted the attention of a support group. Nagata's supporters reported that she had suffered from declining health, including a brain tumor, for several years which had gone untreated. She underwent surgery for a brain tumor in 1984. Nagata collapsed from brain atrophy in 2006 and was transferred to a medical prison in Hachioji. She returned to the Tokyo Detention House in 2007, but was bedridden.
On October 11, 2008, it was revealed that Nagata had fallen into a critical condition due to the tumor, so her family was called for visitation to the Tokyo Detention Center. Nagata died on 5 February 2011.
Read more about this topic: Hiroko Nagata
Famous quotes containing the words criminal and/or death:
“If we are on the outside, we assume a conspiracy is the perfect working of a scheme. Silent nameless men with unadorned hearts. A conspiracy is everything that ordinary life is not. It’s the inside game, cold, sure, undistracted, forever closed off to us. We are the flawed ones, the innocents, trying to make some rough sense of the daily jostle. Conspirators have a logic and a daring beyond our reach. All conspiracies are the same taut story of men who find coherence in some criminal act.”
—Don Delillo (b. 1926)
“I’m beginning to believe that Killer Illiteracy ought to rank near heart disease and cancer as one of the leading causes of death among Americans. What you don’t know can indeed hurt you, and so those who can neither read nor write lead miserable lives, like Richard Wright’s character, Bigger Thomas, born dead with no past or future.”
—Ishmael Reed (b. 1938)