US Marine sentenced to four years for fatal driving in Japan's Okinawa

TOKYO: A US Marine based in Okinawa was sentenced to four years in prison Wednesday for killing a 61-year-old Japanese man last year while driving under the influence of alcohol.



Prosecutors had initially been seeking a six-year term for the fatal offense, but the Naha District Court sentenced 22-year-old Nicholas James-Mclean to four years in prison.

James-Mclean, according to the court's ruling, while driving a 2-ton military vehicle intoxicated, missed a red traffic signal at a junction in Naha City and struck a pickup truck at 88 km per hour, killing its occupant.

"It was extremely dangerous and his negligence is serious. The defendant cannot avoid the prison sentence," Presiding Judge Toshihiro Shibata was quoted by local media as saying.

James-Mclean was arrested following the fatal incident in the early hours of November 19, 2017, and was found by local police to be three times more over the legal limit to be operating a vehicle under the influence of alcohol.

Okinawa, Japan's southernmost prefecture, hosts the bulk of US military bases in Japan. Local citizens and officials have become increasingly irate at instances of US-military-linked crimes, noise, pollution and accidents involving aircraft.



Following the high-profile case of a US base-linked worker murdering a 20-year-old local woman in 2016 and amid staunch opposition to the relocation of a controversial military base within the island, the people of Okinawa have been stepping up calls for their base-hosting burdens to be lifted.

Officials and citizens have been ardently calling for their decades-long burdens to be eased by some of the US bases being relocated outside the prefecture or out of Japan completely.