Yoshihiro Yasuda

Yasuda was one of the defenders of a Shinjuku bus attacker who killed six people in 1980. The attacker wasn't sentenced to death, but he died by suicide in 1997.

Japan Air Lines Flight 404 was an airliner hijacked by Palestinian and Japanese terrorists on July 20, 1973.[4][5] As of 1987, Yasuda was elected to the counsel of the accused (Osamu Maruoka). Osamu Maruoka was sentenced to life imprisonment.

Shoko Asahara, the founder of the religious cult group Aum Shinrikyo, was trialed as the mastermind behind the crimes perpetrated by his followers, including the Tokyo subway sarin gas attack.[6] Yasuda was the court-appointed attorney to defend Asahara in 1995, but was forced to resign from the team due to his arrest in 1998. Some critics asserted that the arrest was made because prosecutors were dissatisfied with Yasuda's court tactics to delay the trial as long as possible to avoid the likely death sentence on Asahara.

1,200 lawyers listed as Yasuda's defenders, and Japan Federation of Bar Associations and Amnesty International protested that the arrest was unfair. After his legal complications were settled in 2003, Yasuda became Asahara's private lawyer.

In September 15, 2006, the Supreme Court upheld the death sentence on Asahara.

Yasuda defended Masumi Hayashi, who was convicted of putting poison in a pot of curry being served at a 1998 summer festival in the Sonobe district of Wakayama, Wakayama, Japan. Yasuda was asked by Kazuyoshi Miura, who was exchanging letters with Masumi Hayashi, to work on this trial. Despite Yasuda's efforts, she was sentenced to death in 2002.[7]

Yasuda was the chief defender for a 19-year-old boy sentenced to death by the Hiroshima High Court in April 2008 for raping and strangling a woman to death and murdering her 1-year-old daughter in 1999 in Hikari city, Yamaguchi.[8] This case has received much attention because of the circumstances of the crime and the possibility of the death penalty being imposed on a minor (the age of majority in Japan was 20 at the time).[9] The Supreme Court ruled that perpetrator's age at the time of the crime did not exempt him from the death penalty. Yasuda and the defense team tried to prevent the death penalty from being applied by claiming that the perpetrator did not intend to kill the woman or her baby.[10] In March 2006, Yasuda and his group of attorneys were absent from the oral argument hearing for an unknown reason. The Japanese media considered their behavior as a tactic to delay the trial just as they did during the Asahara trial; the Supreme Court ordered them to attend the next hearing.