Grieving father seeks ‘harshest term’

The father of murdered student Nicola Furlong has called on the court to hand her alleged killer the harshest sentence possible, and claimed Richard Hinds was still “harming Nicola’s dignity” through his conduct.

In a victim impact statement that was not read out in the Japanese court, Andrew Furlong pleaded for Richard Hinds to receive the severest punishment open to the court for killing his daughter, aged 21, who was found dead in a room at the Keio Plaza Hotel in Tokyo on May 24 last year.

Mr Hinds, aged 19, a musician from Memphis, Tennessee, will today hear the verdict of the court in Tokyo, where he has been standing trial for Ms Furlong’s murder.

Via his lawyer, Yuichi Kawamoto, Mr Furlong asked “that the gravest punishment permitted by the law be sentenced to the defendant”, claiming “there is no reason for the defendant to receive a lighter punishment than, for example, a 20-year-old who committed the same murder, simply because the defendant is 19”.

Operating under the premise that his daughter was murdered by strangulation carried out by the accused, Mr Furlong appealed to the court to consider the motive for the crime, the terms of the crime, and Mr Hinds’s attitude following the crime, which he said was “lacking in regret”.

Of the video footage taken in the Tokyo taxi, Mr Furlong said even before entering the hotel, Mr Hinds and his friend James Blackston, who has since been sentenced for a sexual assault on Ms Furlong’s friend, were planning an “incapacitated rape”, “to force sexual intercourse upon a nearly unconscious Nicola”.

He said while his daughter and Mr Hinds did not have sex, it was not because, as the accused claimed, contraceptives were unavailable, but instead because “the defendant, simply against his expectations, could not rape Nicola”.

“Regardless of the direct motive, from this sequence of events, it is clear that the defendant allowed his libido to take control in bringing Nicola to his room and that he murdered Nicola because something did not go as he wished.

“Nicola became a victim of the defendant’s selfish desires and was murdered.”

Mr Furlong said the terms of the defendant’s crime “are too cruel”, comprising several minutes of strangulation in a manner that must have continued even after “Nicola’s face most likely started noticeably reddening, bleeding, and exhibiting an abnormal form.”

He also rejected claims that his daughter would not have suffered when she died through the possible effects of alcohol. “On Nicola’s neck, there were multiple marks that showed her desperate resistance. The defendant, even while witnessing Nicola’s suffering, continued to strangle her neck right up to the point when she died of suffocation.”

Mr Furlong also had stinging criticism for Mr Hinds’s conduct during the trial and his “naive” and “arrogant” plea of not guilty.

“He spoke as if the lecherous victim forcefully lured the defendant, a man of good conduct.”

Mr Furlong said his daughter had taken one tablet of prescribed medicine the day before her murder, and another drug was entered into her system by medics when her body was found in the hotel.

He accused Mr Hinds of using this information in order to plead not guilty, and that Mr Hinds “framed Nicola, who is no longer with us, as a lecherous drug addict”.

“The dead cannot speak. However, the dead and the bereaved family have dignity,” adding that Mr Hinds had further injured his daughter’s dignity, hurt the bereaved family’s feelings, “and is continuing to extend the damages of this case like a secondary disaster”.