Iwao Hakamada, the prisoner who spent the longest time on death row, acquitted in Japan
AJapanese court on Thursday acquitted Iwao Hakamada, who spent 47 years in prison and is considered the inmate who has spent the longest time on death row in the world, according to the verdict in the new murder trial he underwent after the first one was annulled.
Hakamada, 88, was sentenced to death in 1968 for the murder of a family and remained in prison until 2014, when the courts overturned the sentence over doubts about the veracity of the evidence and ordered a new trial, something very rare in the Asian country.
The new sentence, announced by Judge Koshi Kunii of the Shizuoka Court (southwest of Tokyo), acknowledges that there was “falsification of evidence” for which Hakamada was incriminated by the prosecution and the authorities in charge of the investigation of the case.
There was “false evidence”
Hakamada, a former professional boxer born in Shizuoka in 1936, was sentenced to death in 1968 for murdering the owner of the miso (fermented soybean) factory where he worked, his wife and the couple’s two children two years earlier, and then burning down their house.
The Shizuoka court agreed to retry the former boxer after he insisted that the evidence against him was actually fabricated, specifically some clothes found in one of the factory’s miso tanks and stained with blood that matched his DNA.
Today’s verdict marks the fifth time in postwar Japan that a capital inmate has been acquitted after a retrial. The previous court ruling of this kind was 35 years ago.
Aged 88 and mentally weakened after spending nearly half a century behind bars, the former boxer will receive compensation to be determined based on the number of years he has been in prison, provided there is no appeal by the prosecution. The new verdict can be appealed within two weeks of being announced.
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