the essential
Iwao Hakamada, an 88-year-old former professional boxer, was acquitted this Thursday after spending more than half his life on death row. He was accused of being the author of a quadruple murder that occurred in 1966.
The end of a (very) long fight for Iwao Hakamada. Accused of a quadruple murder that occurred in June 1966 in Japan, the former professional boxer was definitively acquitted yesterday, Thursday September 26, after spending 46 years on death row. Which already constituted a record.
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Aged 88, Iwao Hakamada was unable to attend his trial due to the psychological after-effects that these years of confinement and isolation caused him. The conditions of his interrogation, which lasted 23 days, allowed the court to rule, highlighting the fact that the investigators had fabricated the evidence and that the interrogation methods were inhumane. The latter had forced him to confess to the murders at the time before retracting.
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While working at a company manufacturing fermented soybeans, Iwao Hakamada was accused of murdering his boss, as well as his wife and their two children. A former professional boxer, he had nearly 30 fights at featherweight, more than half of which were victories. Iwao Hakamada was released in 2014, ten years before he was finally acquitted.
