Longest-serving death row inmate in the world acquitted in Japan

JAPAN: The world’s longest serving death row inmate was acquitted by a Japanese court. He was 88 years old. Iwao Hakamada was acquitted after it was found that the evidence against him was fabricated.

According to a BBC report Hakamada has been on death row for almost 50 years and was found guilty in 1968 of killing his boss, the man’s wife and their two teenage children.

He was granted a retrial amid suspicions that the evidence that convicted him for a quadruple murder was actually planted. However, the 46 years he spent on death row have affected his mental health badly and he was not able to attend the hearing where his acquittal verdict was given.

World’s longest-serving death row inmate acquitted in Japan https://t.co/TlSA1THnBe

— BBC Asia (@BBCNewsAsia) September 26, 2024

Hakamada’s case has been one of great public interest. On Thursday (September 26), some 500 people gathered at the courtroom in Shizuoka to hear the verdict.

Ever since he was granted the retrial, Hakamada has been living with his 91-year-old sister Hideko since 2014.

His sister was moved to tears after hearing the verdict.

“When I heard that, I was so moved and happy, I couldn’t stop crying,” Hideko told reporters.

The case

Hakamada was once upon a time a professional boxer. He was working at a miso processing plant in 1966 when the bodies of his employer, the man’s wife and two children were found after a fire at their home in Shizuoka, west of Tokyo. The whole family had been stabbed to death.

The police said that Hakamada had murdered the family, set fire to their home and stolen 200,000 yen in cash.

He denied committing the crime, but after beatings and interrogations for up to 12 hours a day, it was believed that he had confessed to the crimes under duress.

He was convicted in 1968 for murder and arson and sentenced to death. The evidence that was used to incriminate him was mainly bloodstained clothes, but his lawyers had argued for years that the DNA recovered from the clothes did not match his. The lawyers also put forth the possibility that the police may have falsified evidence.

These arguments were enough for a retrial and in 2014, Judge Hiroaki Murayama said that “the clothes were not those of the defendant”.

However, prolonged legal proceedings meant that the retrial only began last year, and the verdict was declared on Thursday.

AFP reported that investigators had tampered with clothes by getting blood on them, which they then hid in the tank of miso.