Ex-Care Worker Gets 20 Years for Murder of Elderly Home Resident

Mito, Ibaraki Pref., July 7 (Jiji Press)–A local court on Tuesday sentenced a former worker at an elderly care home in the city of Koga, Ibaraki Prefecture, east of Tokyo, to 20 years in prison for murdering a resident of the facility in 2020. Megumi Akama, 40, was charged with murdering an 84-year-old resident by injecting air into his intravenous drip tube while working at the facility in May 2020 and also murdering another resident, then 76, using a similar method in July that year. In its ruling, Mito District Court acknowledged that both residents were murdered, but found Akama not guilty of murdering one of them, saying that there was “no proof of crime” and that the murder could have been committed by someone else. The 20-year sentence came against the prosecution’s request for life imprisonment. Akama’s trial began last December, and a total of 53 court hearings were held by June 18. It took 210 days from the first hearing to the ruling, the second-longest such period for a lay judge trial, according to the Supreme Court. During the trial, the prosecution alleged that Akama, a licensed nurse, used her medical knowledge to ensure that the murder would be judged as natural deaths, adding that she was driven by stress. Meanwhile, the defense claimed that the two residents were not murdered, and that it was difficult to determine the cause of their deaths due to the lack of an autopsy on one of the victims and of air analysis on the other. END [Copyright The Jiji Press, Ltd.]