After 46 years on death row in Japan, Iwao Hakamada, now 88 years old, was acquitted on Thursday September 26 by the Shizuoka court during his review trial.
The former boxer was sentenced to death on September 11, 1968 for the murder of his boss, his wife and their two children on June 30, 1966.
The interrogation following his arrest in August 1966 had consisted, according to his lawyers, of 264 hours of questioning, with certain sessions lasting up to sixteen hours, spread over a period of twenty-three days, in order to extract confessions from him. . Confessions that he withdrew during his trial, claiming to have been beaten during interrogations. In 1980, the Japanese Supreme Court upheld Mr. Hakamada’s death sentence.
Many years after his incarceration and sentencing, the head of the three-judge panel that initially convicted Mr. Hakamada, Norimichi Kumamoto, said in 2007 that he doubted his guilt. Seven years later, in 2014, the Shizuoka court also admitted doubts about his guilt following genetic tests which confirmed that the DNA found on bloody clothes was not his. This discovery led to his release without exonerating him.
The road to obtaining a review trial, however, was not 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 make it possible to prove the guilt of Mr. Hakamada, due to a lack of incriminating evidence, and also denounced the brutality of the interrogations suffered by the accused, describing them as “inhumane”. .
In 2023, Japan had just over a hundred people on death row in its prisons. Japanese politicians currently have no plans to abolish the death penalty.
