date itself, so inmates suffer due to the uncertainty of not knowing whether or not any given day will be their last. According to Amnesty International, the intense and prolonged stress means many inmates on death row have poor mental health, suffering from the so-called death row phenomenon. The failure to give advanced notice of executions has been stated by the United Nations Human Rights Committee to be incompatible with articles 2, 7 and 10 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. The Human Rights Documentation Centre says that the issuance of death warrants by the Ministry of Justice may be politically motivated. In 1997, Norio Nagayama, a prisoner who committed the first of several murders as a juvenile, was executed during the sentencing phase of "Sakakibara Seito" for the Kobe child murders, also resulting in a high-profile juvenile murder trial – an attempt, according to South Asia Human Rights Documentation Center, to show that the harshest punishment could be administered to juveniles. According to The New York Times, the execution of Tsutomu Miyazaki after the Akihabara massacre was claimed to be a similar case. Supporters say that due to capital punishment, it acts as a deterrence which resulted in Japan having one of the lowest murder rates in the world, only after Singapore, which also practices capital punishment. A 2020 study examining the issue by the University of Chicago concluded that "neither the death sentence rate nor the execution rate has a statistically significant effect on the homicide and robbery-homicide rates" in Japan. Recent executions For older executions, see List of executions in Japan. See also Criminal justice system of Japan Criminal punishment in Edo-period JapanDeath by Hanging, a 1968 satirical Japanese film by Nagisa Oshima which criticizes the death penalty in Japan Judicial system of Japan Law of Japan Norio Nagayama Nobuto Hosaka Shizuka Kamei Life imprisonment in Japan References External links Japan's Supreme Court jurisprudence on the death penalty : The Nagayama Case (1983) Other landmark cases : 1996 1999 2015 2015 David T. Johnson, "Japan’s Secretive Death Penalty Policy: Contours, Origins, Justifications, and Meanings" Asian-Pacific Law & Policy Journal, vol. 7(2006) pp. 62-124 Death Penalty Database - Japan. Academic research database on the laws, practice, and statistics of capital punishment for every death penalty country in the world. Published by the Cornell Center on the Death Penalty Worldwide. Information current as of: 12 November