Photo/Illutration The Nagasaki Family Court (Takashi Arichika)

Additional cases have emerged in which family courts discarded records of notorious juvenile crimes, despite a Supreme Court notice that such vital documents should be kept.

The revelation came in the aftermath of a report that the Kobe Family Court trashed the records of a 14-year-old serial killer in the western port city in 1997.

The Supreme Court decreed that court records of cases involving minors must be stored until the defendant turns 26. It also included a provision for special preservation of records of cases that attracted national attention or for cases with historical merit because they reflected the social mores of the time.

But it now turns out that the Nagasaki Family Court discarded all records of two cases involving defendants under the age of 15.

In one case in Sasebo in 2004, a girl in the sixth grade fatally slashed a classmate in the neck using a cutter knife. The previous year, a first-year junior high school student in Nagasaki city befriended a boy in kindergarten and then killed him by pushing him off an elevated parking lot.

According to officials of the Nagasaki Family Court, records for the first case were discarded in February 2019 while those of the second case were shredded in March 2018.

The records of a third-year student in an Okayama senior high school who used a baseball bat in 2000 to bludgeon his mother to death after injuring younger members of the school baseball team using the weapon were also tossed.

Other cases in which court records were discarded include one in 2000 in Toyohashi, Aichi Prefecture, in which a 17-year-old was arrested on suspicion of murdering and injuring a married couple, as well as another incident the same year in which a 15-year-old in Oita Prefecture killed or injured six members of a family living in his neighborhood.

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