On this date, 25 August 2007, Rie
Isogai, a 31-year-old Japanese office clerk who was robbed and murdered in
Aichi Prefecture, Japan on the night of 24 August 2007 by three men who became
acquainted through an underground message board. We, the VFFDP, will post
information from Wikipedia and Murderpedia before giving our thoughts about
lesson learned.
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Rie Isogai was a 31-year-old Japanese office
clerk who was robbed and murdered in Aichi Prefecture, Japan on the night of 24
August 2007 by three men who became acquainted through an underground message
board. (SOURCE: http://murderpedia.org/male.K/k/kanda-tsukasa-photos.htm)
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Rie Isogai (磯谷 利恵 Isogai Rie, 20 July 1976 – 25 August 2007) was a
31-year-old Japanese office clerk who was robbed and murdered in Aichi
Prefecture, Japan on the night of 24 August 2007 by three men who became
acquainted through an underground message board. Her murder led to a signature
campaign to call for the death penalty on the three murderers, one of whom was
sentenced to death on 18 March 2009, and two of the murderers were sentenced to
life in prison on 13 April 2011.
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Background
On 17 August 2007, Kenji Kawagishi (川岸 健治 Kawagishi Kenji), a 40-year-old jobless
man living in a van, posted a message to seek partners in crime on a cellphone
website used for exchanging shady information. His message implying robbery was
read and responded by Tsukasa Kanda (神田 司 Kanda Tsukasa), Yoshitomo Hori (堀 慶末 Hori Yoshitomo?) and Yūichirō Hondō (本堂 裕一朗 Hondō Yūichirō). Kanda was a 36-year-old
Asahi Shimbun salesman brought up in Takasaki, Gunma Prefecture. Hori was a
32-year-old unemployed darts player who was under a heavy debt amounting to 4
million yen. Hondō was a 29-year-old jobless man who had difficulty paying his
rent. All of them were desperate for cash.
After exchanging several emails, the
four men met face-to-face for the first time on 21 August to discuss how they
would be able to get money with ease. Hori suggested robbing a wealthy pachinko
player whom he knew, and the other three agreed. They tried in vain to rob him
on the same day. On the night of 23 August, Kawagishi and Hondō broke into a
plumber's office in Nagakute, where Kawagishi ran away from fright, leaving
Hondō alone. With too little money to go home, Hondō surrendered to the police,
arrested for trespassing and attempted theft in the early hours of the 24th.
On the afternoon of 24 August,
Kawagishi, Kanda and Hori met to draft another plot at the parking lot of a
video rental shop in Midori, Nagoya. Kanda suggested that they kidnap and rob a
woman walking on a street and kill her to prevent their robbery from being
detected. Hori and Kawagishi agreed to his proposal.
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Murder
Aboard Kawagishi's van, the three men
searched for a woman walking alone since around 19 o'clock until they saw Rie
Isogai walking home on a dark street in the Jiyūgaoka neighborhood of Chikusa,
Nagoya around 22 o'clock. Hori got out of the van and approached her,
pretending to be asking directions, and forced her into the van. Kanda and Hori
put handcuffs on Isogai, threatened her with knives, and demanded her money and
ATM cards while Kawagishi drove his van to a lonely parking lot in Aisai, a
suburban city of Nagoya. At the parking lot, Hori pulled a knife on Isogai and
extracted her PIN for ATM cards.
Just after midnight, Kawagishi tried
to rape Isogai though he failed in his attempt because Kanda and Hori stopped
him. His sudden attempt to rape her frightened her so much that she tried to
get out of the van, which made the three decide to kill her immediately.
Despite her desperate pleas for her life, about 1 o'clock, Kanda wrapped packing
tape around her head to smother her and, finding her still alive, bludgeoned
her head with a hammer approximately thirty times, while Hori and Kawagishi
choked her with a rope.
After killing her, the three men
dumped the victim's body in a forest in Mizunami, Gifu Prefecture around 4
o'clock, and tried to withdraw money from her bank account at an ATM in a convenience
store, only to find that she had told them the wrong PIN. Disappointed after
failing to withdraw money, they shared 62,000 yen which they had found in the
victim's handbag,
and parted, promising that they would rob and kill women at random near Nagoya
Station in the evening that day.
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Tsukasa Kanda, Yoshitomo Hori, and Kenji
Kawagishi
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Arrest
On 25 August 2007, Kawagishi
telephoned the police to confess to the crime around 13:00. As for the reason
he surrendered to the police, he explained that he was scared of receiving
capital punishment. The Japanese penal
code provides that punishment shall be extenuated if a criminal
surrenders before being identified as a suspect by the authorities.
Finding the victim's abandoned body
abandoned as he described, the police arrested Kawagishi and his crime partners
on 26 August. Fumiko Isogai, the victim's mother and only family member,
identified the body on the same day of their arrest. The three were charged
with murder for robbery, kidnapping for profit, confinement and abandonment of
a corpse by 5 October 2007. Kawagishi was additionally charged with attempted
rape at the scene of robbery.
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Fumiko Isogai, whose only child was killed in
this crime, launched a campaign to call for the death penalty on the three
murderers in September 2007. Within ten days, her petition was signed by
100,000 citizens. (SOURCE: http://murderpedia.org/male.K/k/kanda-tsukasa-photos.htm)
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Petition for death penalty
Fumiko Isogai, whose only child was
killed in this crime, launched a campaign to call for the death penalty on the
three murderers in September 2007. Within ten days, her petition was signed by
100,000 citizens. She presented her petition for the death penalty with some
150,000 signatures to the District Public Prosecutors' Office of Nagoya on 23
October 2007. About 318,000 citizens had signed her petition by December 2008.
Although single murderers rarely face a death penalty in Japan, Takeshi
Tsuchimoto, a criminal law scholar at Hakuoh University and former prosecutor
of the Supreme Public Prosecutors' Office, expected that the recent trend
toward stricter punishments, backed by the growing public support for capital
punishment, would encourage the court to sentence Kanda and Hori to death.
Kawagishi's and Kanda's fathers also asked the court to sentence their sons to
death.
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The Funeral Portrait of Rie Isogai (SOURCE: http://www.jiadep.org/Isogai_Case.html)
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Trial
The trial started at the District
Court of Nagoya on 25 September 2008. All the defendants admitted to robbing
and murdering Rie Isogai at the first session. They agreed that the brutality
escalated as they tried to call each other's earlier boasts. Kanda told
Kawagishi at their first meeting that he had committed homicide twice, and Hori
wrote in an email to Kawagishi that he had just been released from prison, both
of which turned out to be lies each of them told to make himself look bigger
than the others. The defense attorneys argued that they should not be punished
by death because the crime was carried out in an atmosphere that disabled the
bluffing men to say no to each other, whatever atrocious act might be proposed,
and because Isogai's death was accidental and could not be said to be so
vicious as to result in capital punishment, given the sentences handed down in
similar cases in the past.
The defendants disputed over who among
them was the principal culprit and when they agreed to kill the victim.
Kawagishi insisted that Kanda was the principal and that he had not known the
plan to kill the woman until he saw the other two begin to smother her. Hori
also claimed that Kanda led the crime and that he had not thought of murdering
the victim until Kanda suggested choking her at the last minute. Kanda said
that they had achieved a consensus on murder before they began to search for a
woman to rob of money but that it had not been serious until Kawagishi's
attempt to rape her made Isogai change her attitude, claiming that Hori, who
allegedly hit the victim on the head with a hammer before Kanda did, was the
principal.
During trial sessions, the defendants
often got into quarrels with each other. Kanda made fun of Rie Isogai and
called her a liar in his blog, which he started in order to reveal what he
claims to be the true story of this case. Kawagishi said that the victim was
just unlucky. Seeing the defendants far from apologetic, Fumiko Isogai said
that their words were unbearable and added, "It might be better than
superficial apologies".
The prosecutors demanded capital
punishment for all the defendants in the closing argument on 20 January 2009.
They insisted that the court sentence Kawagishi to death despite his voluntary
surrender because he was unrepentant and the police would have been able to
arrest the three without his surrender.
Judgment
On 18 March 2009, the district court
found the defendants guilty of all the charges. It sentenced Kanda and Hori to
death. Judge Hiroko Kondō determined in the ruling that Kanda had played a
leading role in the murder. She said that their motives for the crime left no
room for leniency and that capital punishment was the only option, even after
considering that there was only one victim, because their criminal acts were
extremely merciless and heinous and deemed to be a serious threat to society. Kawagishi
was sentenced to imprisonment for life with possibility of parole because the
court judged that he had provided the police with useful information that led
to the arrest of Kanda and Hori.
Major national newspapers published
editorials in support of Kondō's unorthodox judgment on the premise that
capital punishment should be retained. The Asahi Shimbun and the Mainichi
Shimbun claimed in their editorials that most people would be supportive of
this judgment. The Nikkei commented that the judgment was reasonable.
The Sankei Shimbun aggressively evaluated the judgment as "a
natural and down-to-earth judgment of great significance". The Tokyo
Shimbun expressed the view that capital punishment was inevitable when they
thought how brutal the murder was and what the victim's family felt of it. They
also noted, however, that it would be difficult for citizen judges to determine
whether the death penalty would be appropriate in this kind of case under the lay
judge system, which was started in May 2009. Hiroshi Itakura, a criminal law
scholar at Nihon University said that this decision could be a new criterion
for capital punishment under the lay judge system.
Four hours after he received the death
penalty, Hori told journalists that he felt the words "capital
punishment" were "heavy", though he had been prepared for it.
Kawagishi said, "I'm glad my surrender was counted and I didn't get a
death sentence."
The victim's mother and the victim's
boyfriend expressed their disappointment at the judgment which saved
Kawagishi's life.
Appeal
The three defendants also appealed to
the High Court of Nagoya to have their sentences reduced. However, Kanda
withdrew his own appeal without his attorney's consent to have his death
sentence finalized on 13 April 2009. The prosecutors lodged an appeal against
the district court's decision for Kawagishi on 27 March 2009.
On 13 April 2011 the Nagoya High Court
affirmed Kawagishi's life sentence and reduced Hori's death sentence to life,
ruling that they were both less responsible than Kanda. But the prosecution
appealed the ruling to the Supreme court.
Execution
Tsukasa Kanda was executed by hanging
on June 25, 2015.
Lesson To Learn:
We, the VFFDP, offer
our most sincere and heartfelt condolences to Fumiko Isogai for the loss of her
beautiful daughter. We walk in your shoes and personally wished there was a
Joint Enterprise Law and all the three gangsters will swing for their crimes. The two killers who
were only given life sentences were only happy because they obviously were two
big cowards, who were afraid to die.
We respect and greatly admire you
for being a loving mother who courageously fight for justice for your daughter.
The Japanese public supported you and you got more than 300,000 signatures to
petition for the death penalty. We, the VFFDP, should learn from you. We hope
that your daughter R.I.P.
PLEASE
GO TO THESE THREE YOUTUBE VIDEOS TO LEARN MORE:
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