NAHA (Japan) March 28: A Japanese court sentenced a US airman on Thursday to 32 months in jail for raping a local woman in a case that fanned local fury against the US military and even threatened to fray the strategic US-Japan alliance.
The district court in Naha, capital of Okinawa, ruled that US Air Force Staff Sergeant Timothy Woodland, 25, was guilty of raping the 24-year-old woman on the hood of a car in a shopping centre parking lot last June.
“It is nothing but rape and the crime is horrendous,” the presiding judge said in his verdict read out to a packed courtroom.
Woodland, wearing a beige suit and led by police into court handcuffed with a rope bound around his waste, said he felt sick as the judge was finishing his verdict, and asked if he could sit down.
Prosecutors had demanded a three-year prison sentence.
Woodland had pleaded not guilty, saying the sex was consensual, while the woman has rejected defence suggestions that she had given signs of consent as “outrageous”.
UNWELCOMED GUESTS: The case, which followed a series of unsavoury incidents involving US servicemen, helped reignite simmering resentment towards US forces in Okinawa, reluctant host to the bulk of the American military presence in Japan.
Okinawa has less than one per cent of Japan’s total land mass but is home to 26,000 of the 48,000 US military personnel in the country. Many residents believe they are bearing an unfair share of the burden of supporting US-Japan security ties.
Okinawans critical of the US military presence had said before the ruling that even three years would not be enough, citing past sentences of rape cases involving US servicemen.
In the infamous 1995 rape of a 12-year-old Japanese school girl on Okinawa, the three US military personnel who were found guilty each got a prison sentence ranging from six years and six months to seven years.
But lawyers said three years for rape was the norm in Japanese courts, adding that under Japanese criminal law, two years in prison is the minimum for rape, and that it is rare for the sentences to be over five years.
DIPLOMATIC ROW: The incident itself and Washington’s delay in handing over Woodland to the Japanese authorities soured relations between the two countries, reigniting calls for a revision in the Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA), the pact governing the conduct of the US military in Japan.—Reuters
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