Daisuke Mori

Who is Daisuke Mori?

Daisuke Mori is a Japanese nurse, who was convicted for giving lethal doses of the muscle relaxant drug Vecuronium to his patients in a clinic in Izumi-ku, Sendai, Miyagi Prefecture. He was suspected as a medical serial killer, though he was convicted of one murder.

Mori was suspected of a murder of 89-year-old woman Yukiko Shimoyama on November 24, 2000. He was also suspected of four attempted murders; a 1-year-old girl on 2 February 2000, an 11-year-old girl on 31 October 2000, a four-year-old boy on 13 November 2000 and a 45-year-old man on 24 November 2000. He was arrested on January 6, 2001.

When he was arrested, he was reported to have murdered at least 10 people. However, he insisted on his innocence four days after his arrest. He may have protected his girlfriend. There were also many problems and mysterious deaths in his hospital, so his lawyers insisted that he was accused as their substitute. The U.S. newsmagazine Time criticised Japanese hospitals as well as him.

The district court in Sendai sentenced him to life imprisonment on March 30, 2004 for one murder and four attempted murders. Japanese police insisted that Vecuronium's molecular mass is 258, but this true molecular mass is 557. His defense pointed out this contradiction on the high court, but the high court in Sendai upheld the original sentence on March 22, 2006. He appealed to Supreme Court, which upheld the sentence on February 25, 2008.