Bhathiya Barukanda
Iwao Hakamada was the world’s longest-serving death row inmate, as case that has gripped Japan sees calls for death penalty to be scrapped
A set of blood-stained trousers found in a tank of miso in 1967 sealed a young Iwao Hakamada’s destiny as the world’s longest serving death row inmate.
But on Thursday, former professional boxer Mr Hakamada, now 88, was finally acquitted by a Japanese court of the murder of his boss, the man’s wife and their two teenage children.
Mr Hakamada was too fragile to attend the hearing in person, but his sister and long-time supporter Hideko, 91, bowed in thanks to the judge, Koshi Kunii, who declared her brother “innocent” after a miscarriage of justice spanning more than five decades.
Hundreds of people had queued outside the Shizuoka district court for a seat to hear the verdict of a sensational case that has not only gripped the nation but also revived calls for Japan to scrap the death penalty.
Before he was released in 2014 pending his retrial, Mr Hakamada had spent 46 years on death row never knowing from one day to the next if it was his last. In Japan, prisoners are only notified of their hanging a few hours in advance.
In March 2014, the Shizuoka court granted him a retrial after DNA evidence surfaced which questioned the reliability of his conviction and raised the possibility that prosecutors could have planted evidence.
Mr Hakamada was released from jail but legal wrangling, including protests from the prosecutors, meant that the actual retrial, a rare occurrence in Japan’s legal system, did not start until 2023.
As a young man, his ordeal began when he retired as a professional boxer in 1961 and got a job at a soybean processing plant in Shizuoka, central Japan.
Five years later, when his boss and his family were found stabbed to death in their home, Mr Hakamada was identified by police as the prime suspect.
Under intense questioning in detention, he initially confessed to the charges but later changed his plea, stating that the police had beaten and coerced him.
Central to his conviction was a set of blood-stained clothes found in a tank of fermented soybean paste, or miso, but the defence accused investigators of a set-up as the red stains were too bright. A DNA test on the blood later revealed no match to Mr Hakamada or the victims.
The marathon legal case has thrown a spotlight on Japan’s criminal justice system which critics say is excessively prone to intimidating suspects during long and arbitrary periods of detention, a phenomenon dubbed “hostage justice”.
A 2023 report by Human Rights Watch said that while Japan’s legal system was “widely regarded internationally as competent and impartial”, its criminal justice system “functions on laws, procedures, and practices that systematically violate the rights of accused persons”.
It said the deeply ingrained problems of the “hostage justice” system included suspects being detained for up to several months or over a year to obtain their confessions.
Mr Hakamada has not publicly commented on the verdict.
In 2018, he told AFP that he felt he was “fighting a bout every day,” adding: “Once you think you can’t win, there is no path to victory.”
His mental health has since declined and his sister Hideko, who campaigned for decades to prove his innocence, told CNN that he is now “living in his own world,” seldom speaking or showing interest in other people.
Amnesty International welcomed the court’s verdict as “an important recognition of the profound injustice he endured for most of his life,” and as the result of an “inspiring fight” by his sister.
But the rights group also used the occasion to call for the reform of Japan’s justice system.
Japan and the US are the only two countries in the G7 that still have capital punishment.
According to Amnesty, as of the end of 2023, 107 out of the 115 people on death row had their death sentences finalised and were at risk of execution.
“As we celebrate this long overdue day of justice for Hakamada, we are reminded of the irreversible harm caused by the death penalty. We strongly urge Japan to abolish the death penalty to prevent this from happening again,” said Amnesty’s East Asia researcher Boram Jang.
source: teligraph.com.uk
