Iwao Hakamada has been acquitted 56 years after being sentenced to death in Japan in 1968. A district court in central Japan has found him not guilty of the 1966 murder of his boss and his boss’s family at the miso factory where he worked. Hakamada, now 88, has always maintained his innocence, surviving 45 years on death row – the longest time spent awaiting execution by any prisoner anywhere in the world, according to Amnesty International. He was released in 2014 when new evidence emerged and a new trial was ordered, which finally began in October last year. After 15 hearings, the Shizuoka District Court on Thursday handed down the acquittal. It clears Hakamada, a former professional boxer, of his name almost six decades after the incident that blew his life away.
The presiding judge, Koshi Kundi, has acknowledged that multiple pieces of evidence had been fabricated and that Hakamada was not guilty, according to the Japanese state news service NHK. The verdict includes several irregularities in the investigations, including the violation of the defendant’s right to remain silent and “inhuman” interrogation practices, according to EFE. Hakamada only admitted to having committed the crime after being subjected to gruelling interrogations of more than 12 hours a day for 23 days, but later flatly denied the facts. The Japanese justice system has acknowledged that the confession was “induced” by “mental and physical suffering.”
In 1967, three judges found him guilty by two votes to one after reading the confession signed by Hakamada himself. He was subjected to 277 hours of accusations by the police in a Daiyo Kangoku —the name given to the cells inside police stations where interrogations are carried out without a time limit, without a lawyer and without the guarantee of a camera recording everything— compared to just 37 minutes with his defence. The police had been after him from the start. Hakamada, a worker in a miso factory in Shimizu, was the stranger in a town that was not his own, the easy target to accuse of the violent deaths of Fumio Hashiguchi, the owner of the business, his wife, Chizuko, and two of the couple’s three children, Machiko and Yuichiro. They were stabbed and then burned to death in their home. 200,000 yen (about 1,200 euros at the current exchange rate) were also missing.
In addition to the confession itself, the police produced Hakamada’s pajamas at the trial in 1967, which had a small drop of blood on them. The defendant said it was his, but had been caused by a cut on his finger. During the hearing, a laboratory specialist testified that there was insufficient blood to be analyzed. Then the prosecutor, who under Japanese law was not required to produce all the evidence, presented new evidence. The police, he said, had found six of Iwao’s clothes stained with blood inside a tank at the miso factory, fourteen months after the events. The defendant did not recognize the clothes as his, insisted on his innocence, and said he had been forced to confess to a crime he had not committed. But it did not matter. All three judges convicted him, although not unanimously.
Now, six decades later, another point of controversy in the new trial has revolved around the colour of the blood stains on the clothes that served to convict Hakamada. The court has supported the defence’s claim that the reddish colour could not be blood stains from the time of the incident, since blood stains on clothes do not remain red when dipped in miso for more than a year. Today’s ruling states that this evidence was “fabricated” by investigators, something that was always maintained by the family, lawyers and one of the three judges who convicted Hakamada in the 1960s. The latter, Norimichi Kumamoto, explained in 2011 in an interview for a report on the Hakamada case in The Country WeeklyHe said he did not agree with the verdict but was forced to write it. “I don’t understand how the other judges ignored the evidence. The eldest said: ‘He is guilty.’ That was enough. He ordered me to write the verdict. I was in a mess for a week. I wrote 300 pages and we sentenced him to death. In an annex I added that I did not agree, but they forced me to keep quiet.”
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When he was sentenced, Hakamada, who had been a professional boxer (at 21 he was the sixth best Japanese featherweight) began a titanic struggle with his sister Hideko, who always believed in him, to reverse his situation as a condemned man to the gallows. But he gradually lost his mental health to the point of near insanity. In Japan, where the case has been followed with great expectation, death sentences enjoy strong public support. The country remains the only member of the G7 (along with the United States) that has not yet abolished capital punishment. The system dictates that the condemned live alone, without communication with other inmates, in a cell the size of three tatami mats (less than five square meters) from which they do not leave for more than 45 minutes a day. But above all, the prisoners do not know their execution date. Thus, every morning they wake up not knowing if it will be their last, a psychological torture. The condemned are informed only one hour before the hanging (the method used since 1873). There are no farewells or last suppers. Just a brief stop in front of a Buddhist altar. Immediate relatives and lawyers, the only ones allowed to visit the prisoner during his sentence, are informed after the execution. This is to “prevent the prisoner from becoming upset”, the Ministry of Justice argues.
The Sister’s Battle
The legal battle for Hakamada’s innocence cannot be understood without his sister, Hideko, who has devoted almost half her life to fighting for his innocence in an example of unimaginable perseverance. During this time, for example, she was unable to speak to her brother for 14 years, as he refused to allow her visits in the early 1980s. It was then that the turn of Hakamada’s cellmate came. The guards took him away screaming, and at that moment Iwao began to lose his mind. He stopped writing letters to his family. “I have no sister,” Hideko said her brother would say when she came to see him at the Tokyo Detention Center. Despite the refusals, the woman, now 91 years old, continued to go to the prison once a month, a gray concrete complex with ten floors next to the Arakawa River. When Hideko resumed her meetings with her brother, the prisoner was broken. Their conversations were already meaningless. “I am building a castle!” she exclaimed. She – as she recounted kneeling on the tatami of her house surrounded by letters and old photographs for that report of The Country Weekly—I played along: “I’m glad. I hope you finish it on time.”
On Thursday, before the verdict was handed down, Hideko said she was in a never-ending battle. “It is so difficult to get a retrial started,” she told reporters in Tokyo, according to AP. “Not just Iwao, but I am sure there are other people who have been wrongly accused and are crying … I want the criminal law to be revised to make it easier to hold retrials.” Hideko was the one who attended the retrial hearings on behalf of her brother, who was acquitted because of his “inability to offer credible testimony” due to his mental condition. It is the fifth time in postwar Japan that a court has ruled on a retrial of a defendant whose death sentence has been completed. The last such sentence was handed down 35 years ago. Attention now turns to whether prosecutors, who again sought the death penalty in the retrial, will appeal Thursday’s verdict. The defense team has urged prosecutors not to challenge the acquittal, Kyodo news agency reports. The four previous verdicts for acquitting death row inmates ended without appeal by prosecutors.
Human rights organisations have welcomed the decision. “After enduring almost half a century of unjust imprisonment and another 10 years waiting for a new trial, this verdict is an important recognition of the profound injustice he suffered for most of his life,” said Boram Jang, East Asia researcher at Amnesty International, in a statement. “As we celebrate this long overdue day of justice for Hakamada, we remember the irreversible damage caused by the death penalty. We strongly urge Japan to abolish the death penalty to prevent this from happening again.” Amnesty Spain, which has also closely followed the case for years, said: “His fight to prove his innocence and be released is a journey full of injustice, tragedy and hope in a country, Japan, where capital punishment is legal. “Iwao Hakamada’s story is a testament to the importance of ensuring fair and transparent justice, and the power of fighting for freedom and justice in times of great adversity.”
