A Living Corpse: Invisible Individuals under the Death Sentence

In this Kirby Seminar, Associate Professor Mai Sato will explain that the body of the executed is the obvious and inevitable outcome of the death penalty.

However, to reduce the death penalty to the act of taking away life does not capture the full extent of the punishment. The death penalty begins when an individual is labelled by the State as worthy of death. Individuals live, often for years, under the death sentence. Focusing on Japanese prisoners, this presentation examines what is often an invisible, hard to research, aspect of the death penalty: how individuals live on death row. Much of the Japanese death penalty process is invisible. The Government does not release information on how prisoners are executed, the treatment of death row prisoners or the process of selecting who on death row is to be executed.

This presentation uses rare photographs of penal institution in Japan obtained by an NGO and findings from a survey of individuals on death row conducted by the Japan Federation of Bar Associations. It analyses the experiences of individuals on death row glimpsed from photographs, and a survey describes how access to both data were achieved and examines aspects of the death penalty that remain invisible.

Mai Sato is an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Law, Monash University. She is the inaugural director of Eleos Justice,  https://www.monash.edu//eleos a collaboration between Capital Punishment Justice Project, an NGO working to end the death penalty, and the Faculty of Law at Monash University. It is committed to the restriction and abolition of the death penalty in Asia.

Mai is a social scientist by training and has led and worked on projects on the death penalty in Japan, Malaysia, the Philippines, India, Kenya, and Zimbabwe. Her monograph The Death Penalty in Japan: Will the Public Tolerate Abolition? (Springer, 2014), and her documentary film which captured a social experiment exploring what the death penalty meant to ordinary Japanese citizens, influenced the decision by the Japan Federation of Bar Associations to become an abolitionist organisation in 2016.

Mai’s interest in the death penalty is not limited to scholarly understanding of punishment and the criminal justice system. After completing a European Commission funded project, Mai has created and currently co-runs an NGO CrimeInfo which promotes the abolition of the death penalty in Japan.

Seminar will take place 12 noon AEST Thursday 18 July 2024      

On Campus: Lewis Seminar Room 30, W38 - School of Law Building

Webinar: To obtain the webinar link, please register for this Kirby Seminar here.