After 46 years on death row in Japan, Iwao Hakamada, now 88, was acquitted on Thursday, September 26 by the Shizuoka court during his retrial.
The former boxer was sentenced to death on September 11, 1968 for the murder of his boss, his wife and their two children, which occurred on June 30, 1966.
The interrogation following his arrest in August 1966 consisted, according to his lawyers, of 264 hours of questioning, with some sessions lasting up to sixteen hours, spread over a period of twenty-three days, in order to extract a confession from him. Confessions that he had withdrawn at his trial, claiming to have been beaten during the interrogations. In 1980, the Japanese Supreme Court upheld Mr. Hakamada’s death sentence.
Many years after his imprisonment and sentencing, the head of the three-judge panel that had originally convicted Mr. Hakamada, Norimichi Kumamoto, said in 2007 that he had doubts about his guilt. Seven years later, in 2014, the Shizuoka District Court also admitted doubts about his guilt following genetic testing that showed that DNA found on bloody clothing was not his. This discovery led to his release but did not exonerate him.
The path to obtaining a retrial was not, however, easy, and it was only today, Thursday, September 26, that Iwao Hakamada was finally exonerated by a court. The judge considered that the investigation did not allow Mr. Hakamada to be proven guilty, due to a lack of incriminating evidence, and also denounced the brutality of the interrogations undergone by the accused, describing them as “inhumane.”
As of 2023, there were just over a hundred people on death row in Japan’s prisons. Japanese politicians have no plans to abolish the death penalty at this time.
