World’s longest-serving death row inmate acquitted in Japanese retrial

A Japanese court found an 88-year-old man not guilty on Thursday in a retrial for a 1966 quadruple murder, reversing the decision that had put Iwao Hakamada on death row for 45 years.

The decision in Shizuoka District Court has renewed debate about the death penalty in Japan, which is one of only two Group of Seven advanced democracies, along with the United States, that uses capital punishment.

The acquittal also highlighted Japan’s notoriously slow and severe legal system, in which conviction rates can exceed 99 percent and retrials are rare. Only five death sentences have been overturned on retrial since World War II, Japanese media outlets reported.

As the decades ticked by, advocacy groups began to call Hakamada the world’s longest-serving death row inmate.

The former boxer, who had been released from prison in 2014 when his retrial was granted, was not present in court Thursday because of poor health. His elder sister, Hideko Hakamada, attended instead, wearing a white suit that she said symbolized her brother’s innocence.

At a news conference, Hideo Hakamada, 91, thanked her brother’s supporters for sticking with him through the lengthy trial. After the not-guilty verdict, she said, “I could not stop crying because I was so happy. I was in tears for an hour.”

Iwao Hakamada’s lawyers said the court ruled that investigators had fabricated key evidence and urged prosecutors not to appeal the decision. Though Hakamada made a confession in 1966, he retracted it at his original trial, arguing it was made under duress, and has maintained his innocence since.

“After enduring almost half a century of wrongful imprisonment and a further 10 years waiting for his retrial, this verdict is an important recognition of the profound injustice he endured for most of his life,” Boram Jang, an East Asia researcher for rights group Amnesty International, said in a statement.

Hakamada had been convicted of a quadruple homicide that occurred in June 1966. A family of four, including two teenage children, were stabbed to death, and their home was set on fire. Investigators later discovered that a large sum of money had been stolen.

Hakamada had worked for one of the victims and was quickly identified as a potential suspect. Though he denied the charges initially, after a lengthy interrogation he confessed. Police later said they had tied him to bloody clothing discovered in a tank of miso, a thick paste used in Japanese cooking.

Even though Hakamada recanted his confession, his death sentence was finalized in 1980. He first filed a motion for a retrial in 1981, which was dismissed. Since then, his case had bounced around various courts until his retrial began in 2018.

On Thursday, the presiding judge, Koshi Kunii, concluded that the bloodstained clothes had been planted by police to ensure Hakamada’s conviction and said that his initial confession had been “forced by inflicting physical and mental pain,” Japan’s Mainichi Shimbun reported.

Nearly 100 prisoners have been executed in Japan in recent decades. Amnesty International, which opposes the death penalty, called on the country to address human rights concerns over its use of capital punishment. Prisoners “with mental (psycho-social) and intellectual disabilities continued to be subjected to the death penalty, in violation of international law and standards,” the group said in a statement.

The acquittal came as a very different death penalty case made international headlines: This week in the United States, where more than 20 states allow capital punishment, the state of Missouri executed Marcellus Williams, even though the prosecutor’s office that secured his murder conviction had pushed for a plea deal that would have given him a life sentence.