Shigemitsu Dando

Shigemitsu Dando (1913 to 2012) was a Japanese legal scholar and academic researcher of criminology who spent much of his career as a professor in the department of social and political sciences at the University of Tokyo before serving as a justice of the Supreme Court of Japan. His scholarship and later public advocacy centered on criminal procedure and the death penalty, most notably in his book Shikei Haishiron, or Discussion on the Abolition of the Death Penalty, in which he argued for ending capital punishment in Japan, a striking position for a former judge who had presided over capital cases. He was later honored as a Person of Cultural Merit and received the Grand Cordon of the Order of the Rising Sun in recognition of his standing in Japanese legal scholarship.