A woman with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) was killed through euthanasia by two doctors in Japan — and now, one has been sentenced to time in prison for it.
In 2020, 51-year-old Yuri Hayashi was killed in her home in Kyoto by doctors Yoshikazu Okubo and Naoki Yamamoto. Hayashi had been diagnosed with ALS in 2011, and after nine years, wanted to die. She transferred ¥1.3 million — roughly $8,700 — to Yamamoto, and was found dead by her caretaker on November 30th, just moments after Okubo and Yamamoto left.
Neither doctor was among her attending physicians, and they pretended to be acquaintances in order to gain access to her apartment. Traces of a barbiturate were found in her body afterwards.
Hayashi is believed to have found the doctors on Twitter (now X), after using a computer that tracked her eye movements to write out her suicidal ideations. “I don’t know why I have to live with such a body,” she wrote online.
Neither assisted suicide nor euthanasia are legal in Japan, and both doctors were arrested and indicted. Now, over four years later, the Osaka High Court has upheld a sentence of over two years in prison for Yamamoto. Okubo and Yamamoto had both been given jail time, though Okubo was given a much longer sentence. The defense for both was that Hayashi wanted to die; therefore, killing her was acceptable.
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Okubo’s lawyers claimed that without euthanasia, Hayashi would have been forced to live “an unwanted life,” and argued, “The act of killing is justifiable, and he should be acquitted.” The high court clearly disagreed, though it has so far only ruled on Yamamoto’s case; Okubo’s appeal of his sentence is still in the works.
In the ruling, Presiding Judge Yuko Tsuboi said both doctors had a disregard for human life, and pointed out that neither of them met or assessed Hayashi before the day they killed her. In the original trial, prosecutors stated that Okubo believes the elderly and those with incurable diseases are a drain on society, exploiting medical expenses, and that they should be targeted to die.
The aging population of Japan has been considered to be a national crisis; Okubo’s beliefs are far from rare, in Japan or outside of it. Yusuke Narita, a professor of economics at Yale University, caused international headlines when he argued that the elderly population should commit mass suicide — and if they weren’t willing to commit suicide, then mandatory euthanasia should be carried out by the state.
