A court official said that the Tokyo High Court upheld a lower Yokohama District Court December 2007 conviction. That suspended for three years the 1 1/2-year prison terms for the two former Mitsubishi employees. This means they won't have to go to prison after all as they had appealed their lower court convictions.
The accident happened in January 2002 when Shiho Okamoto, age 29, who was walking on a sidewalk with her two children was crushed to death by a wheel that flew off the axle of a Mitsubishi truck. In addition, her two boys were injured.
When the unfortunate accident happened, both employees were in charge of quality control at Tokyo-based Mitsubishi Motors Corp. However, the Japanese automaker refused to comment on the accident at that time but explained they were seriously thinking of compliance measures.
"We pray for the soul of the person who has died and apologize from the bottom of our hearts for her family," it said in a statement.
Unfortunately, this was not the only incident of the kind for the Japanese automaker. There was also a scandal in 2000 over a systematic hiding of defects for decades. At that time, the Japanese car maker recalled millions of vehicles as some of them had multiple problems.
Last year, a former Mitsubishi Motors president, Katsuhiko Kawasoe, was found guilty of professional negligence in a separate 2002 accident in which a driver died after the brakes failed on his Mitsubishi vehicle.
Sadly, it seems that consumer reports regarding different complaints were hidden in a company locker for decades. Taking into consideration the events that have happened, Mitsubishi trucks could be considered a real danger on the roads...
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