Hakamada Iwao last February
Japanese courts acquitted an 88-year-old man on Thursday after he was sentenced to death for the murder of four people in 1966.
The Shizuoka District Court declared that Hakamada Iwao’s guilt “was not recognized”, ruling that evidence of his involvement had been falsified.
This is the fifth time since the end of the war that an individual in Japan has been exonerated after the death penalty was imposed.
Hakamada Iwao, a former professional boxer who worked in a box manufacturing factory miso (fermented soybean paste), was arrested in 1966 on suspicion of having killed his boss, his wife and two children, and setting fire to their home. He confessed to the quadruple murder, but later recanted after saying he was mistreated by police.
Sentenced to the death penalty, he spent 46 years on death row, before being released in 2014 following DNA analyses. These had shown that the blood stains from five items of clothing found in a barrel of miso 14 months after the crime had nothing to do with it.
One of the five clothes which had constituted proof of Hakamada Iwao’s guilt.
Although prosecutors appealed the decision, the Tokyo High Court rejected their request. But in 2020, however, the Supreme Court finally returned the case to him and a new trial opened since October last year, and the public prosecutor had again requested the death penalty.
During the verdict on September 26, the Shizuoka court found that Hakamada’s confession “had been obtained at the cost of inhumane interrogations with serious consequences on his mental and physical health, at the same time violating his right to remain silent and pushing people to make false statements. The court also underlined that it was not possible to recognize that the clothes could have kept their reddish tint after having been soaked for more than a year in a barrel of miso.
His sister Hideko, 91, has always fought to exonerate her brother, who suffers from severe dissociative disorders due to his long period of imprisonment. “We don’t have much time left to live, so I ask that Iwao be able to spend his last years in a decent way, like a human being,” she said last May.
Prosecutors have not yet announced whether they will appeal the acquittal.
[Copyright The Jiji Press, Ltd.]
