The Osaka District Court on October 29 sentenced a woman in her 50s to three years in prison, suspended for four years, for killing her common-law husband with his consent, a crime of consented killing (shōdaku satsujin). Prosecutors had sought four years. She had wanted to die since her teens. He had wanted to live.
According to the indictment, the woman planned a joint suicide with her partner and killed him at the home they shared, obtaining his consent and injecting air into his vein. She admitted the charge.
The two had been together for nearly 30 years, with a break at one point. She chose not to register the marriage but introduced him to her family, and the relationship was good, according to opening statements and other accounts given in court.
A view of death formed in her teens
The woman trained as a nurse after graduating from vocational school. Since her teens she had thought she did not want to live long, and questioned whether extending life through treatment had meaning. No book or person shaped the view, she said. It arose on its own.
Her partner did not share it at first. When she told him how she felt about death, he said he wanted to live a long life.
At some point he came to accept dying, and the two decided on a joint suicide. The words that set it off, as quoted in the headline of the original report, were: "There's nothing to do, so isn't it about time?" She then ended his life and tried to end her own. She survived.
In court the woman, who had wanted to die, wept. She said she should have thought about a way for the two of them to live together, the court heard.
She answered questions calmly and with a dark expression, according to a courtroom account by a court reporter writing under the name Futsū. Her words carried a stubbornness, the account said: she did not bend her own views.
The case turned on consent: whether a person who asks to die can give valid consent, and what the law does when the person who survives says afterward that she wished she had found another way. The court accepted that the husband consented, and convicted her of consented killing rather than murder. It suspended the sentence.