[Deathpenalty] death penalty news----worldwide
July 22 JAPAN: Death wish: Portrait of an arsonistFrom the ashes of the murderous Kyoto Animation arson, troubling questions and frightening patterns emergeKyoto police are piecing together the evidence behind Thursday’s deadly arson attack that claimed 34 lives and injured dozens of others. After the attack on Japan’s beloved Kyoto Animation studio, an arrest warrant was issued for the man thought responsible, Shinji Aoba, 41, a resident of Saitama Prefecture, on charges of arson and murder. The suspect’s motives remain murky. Who is Aoba and why did he commit this horrendous crime? What has emerged is that neither his neighbors nor the authorities were surprised he was involved in an apparently senseless act of violence. Could, then, the tragedy have been averted? That is something the police, the fire department, the company, the victims’ family members and wider society will be asking in the days and weeks ahead. A killer strikes According to NHK, other Japanese media, the police and other sources, two days before the attack, multiple sightings of Aoba were confirmed. On Monday last week he was seen loitering around the parking lot of a convenience store 200 meters from the building. Seemingly agitated, he was playing with his smartphone. He had two containers with him – possibly, these were later filled with gasoline. On Wednesday, a teenager spotted a man in a red T-shirt and blue jeans sleeping on a park bench about 500 meters from the studio at 8 or 9pm. He had a cart parked next to him. The description matches the clothing Aoba was wearing when he was arrested after the attack. On Thursday morning, Aoba bought gasoline from a nearby gas station and was seen carrying the two 20-liter cans towards the studio on a cart. Allegedly, he burst into the studio building screaming “Die!” as he doused the floors with gasoline from a bucket. He also is suspected of pouring the gasoline in front of all available exits and entrances to the building. He then ignited the gasoline with a lighter – setting fire to himself in the process. Although he escaped from the building on bare, bloody feet, he was apprehended by police. In the early stages of questioning, while still conscious, Aoba told police that Kyoto Animation had “stolen his novel.” Revenge for alleged plagiarism appears to have been his motive. However, in media interviews, Kyoto Animation President Hideaki Hatta said he had knowledge of Aoba, did not take outside submissions and did not believe there was any merit to the claim. Troubled child, troubled man Over the weekend, a clearer picture began to emerge. According to an article in Weekly Bunshun, he was a middle child, with an older brother and younger sister. His parents were divorced and he lived with his father, in poverty. In elementary school, he joined the judo club, but had few friends. He was bullied in middle school and started to spend an increasing amount of time alone at home – a so-called hikikomori, or “shut-in.” In Japan, Japan’s hikikomori are increasingly mythologized as people who can turn into violent criminals in a flash. Aoba may fuel this belief. He attended high school at night, did odd-jobs, worked for the prefectural government, delivered newspapers and worked at convenience stores. His father passed away some time before 2005. In 2006, Aoba was allegedly brought in for questioning by police for stealing underwear. Worse was to follow. In June 2012, he robbed a convenience store, stealing 20,000 yen (US$185). He was jailed and released in January 2016. He was subsequently placed in a government welfare program for ex-convicts needing special assistance and lived in a partially government-managed facility, but eventually moved into his own apartment. His neighbors found him alarming. A 27-year-old neighbor, who asked not to be named, said Aoba accused him of making loud noises at night. Aoba grabbed the neighbor by the collar and hair and threatened to kill him. Local police confirmed that last August there was a complaint against Aoba for playing loud music at night and police had to enter his apartment via the balcony when he refused to open the door. In the fire he allegedly set, Aoba was severely burned on his face, chest and legs. He is now in a specialist burns unit in Osaka. Police are waiting for him to recover before conducting a more in-depth interrogation. There are questions about his mental state, but he appears to have been fully capable of planning the attack and waiting for the opportune time. Mass murderers’ minds Were there warning signs that should have been heeded? Anonymous death threats were made to the studio, via their website, up to one year before the attack, but police had not identified the person making the threats. It was not known if they came from Aoba. In March 2013, a Ministry of Justice-affiliated institute published
[Deathpenalty] death penalty news----NY, FLA.
July 22 NEW YORK: Robert Morgenthau, Longtime Manhattan District Attorney, Dies at 99 Robert M. Morgenthau, a courtly Knickerbocker patrician who waged war on crime for more than four decades as the chief federal prosecutor for Southern New York State and as Manhattan’s longest-serving district attorney, died on Sunday in Manhattan. He was 99. Mr. Morgenthau’s wife, Lucinda Franks, said he died at Lenox Hill Hospital after a short illness. In an era of notorious Wall Street chicanery and often dangerous streets, Mr. Morgenthau was the bane of mobsters, crooked politicians and corporate greed; a public avenger to killers, rapists and drug dealers; and a confidant of mayors and governors, who came and went while he stayed on — for nearly nine years in the 1960s as the United States attorney for the Southern District of New York and for 35 more as Gotham’s aristocratic Mr. District Attorney. For a Morgenthau — the scion of a family steeped in wealth, privilege and public service — he was strangely awkward, a wooden speaker who seemed painfully shy on the stump. His grandfather had been an ambassador in President Woodrow Wilson’s day, and his father was President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s treasury secretary. His own early political forays, 2 runs for governor of New York, ended disastrously. But from Jan. 1, 1975, when he took over from an interim successor to the legendary district attorney Frank S. Hogan, to Dec. 31, 2009, when he finally gave up his office in the old Criminal Courts Building on the edge of Chinatown, Mr. Morgenthau was the face of justice in Manhattan, a liberal Democrat elected nine times in succession, usually by landslides and with the endorsement of virtually all the political parties. He presided over a battalion of 500 lawyers, a $75 million budget and a torrent of cases every year that fixed the fates of accused stock manipulators, extortionists, murderers, muggers, wife-beaters and sexual predators, and in turn helped to shape the quality of life for millions in a city of vast riches and untold hardships. While he rarely went to court himself, Mr. Morgenthau, by his own count, supervised a total of 3.5 million cases over the years. Many of them were run-of-the-mill drug busts, but there were also highly publicized trials, like those of the subway vigilante Bernard Goetz; the Central Park “preppy” killer, Robert Chambers; and John Lennon’s assassin, Mark David Chapman. His victories included the 2005 conviction of L. Dennis Kozlowski, chief executive of Tyco International, whose $6,000 shower curtains and a $2 million birthday party for his wife on the Mediterranean island of Sardinia came to symbolize corporate greed. Found guilty of misappropriating more than $100 million from his company, Mr. Kozlowski was sentenced to eight to 25 years, although he won parole in 2014. In a bizarre case, Mr. Morgenthau may have been the only prosecutor in history to convict a mother and son for murder without a body or a witness. The defendants, Sante and Kenneth Kimes, were accused of a scheme in 1998 to assume the identity of their landlady, the 82-year-old socialite Irene Silverman, and take over her $7.7 million Manhattan mansion. Her body was never found, but they were convicted of her murder and scores of other charges in 2000, partly on the basis of Sante Kimes’s notebooks detailing the plot and notes by the victim expressing fear of her lodgers. Sante Kimes denied everything, but Kenneth confessed later that his mother had used a stun gun on the victim and that he had then strangled her, stuffed the body in a bag and left it in a dumpster in Hoboken, N.J. Mr. Morgenthau’s pursuit of crime sometimes took him beyond Manhattan. In 2004, he won a bribery-conspiracy case against State Senator Guy J. Velella, a Republican whose district lay entirely outside Manhattan, in the Bronx and Westchester County. Prosecutors using surveying equipment showed that one crime scene was within 500 yards of Manhattan, and argued successfully that it fell within their jurisdiction. Federal prosecutors said Mr. Morgenthau also did not respect jurisdictional lines when he followed the money trails in white-collar crimes to Paraguay, Iran, the Cayman Islands and Belgium. Two weeks before he retired, Mr. Morgenthau reached a $536 million settlement with Credit Suisse, Switzerland’s second-largest bank, which had helped Iranian, Libyan and Sudanese clients hide shady business in America. But Mr. Morgenthau spent years working with federal prosecutors investigating the Bank of Credit and Commerce International, a global enterprise founded by Middle Eastern investors as a nexus for money that flowed in and out of drug cartels, terrorist groups and dictatorships. In 1991, the bank pleaded guilty to federal and state charges in what Mr. Morgenthau called the largest bank fraud in financial history, with losses estimated at $15
