Tokyo, Sep 26 (EFE).- A court in Japan on Thursday acquitted Iwao Hakamada, who spent 46 years in prison and is considered the world’s longest-serving prisoner on death row, during a retrial.
Hakamada, 88, was sentenced to death in 1968 for the murder of a family and remained in prison until 2014, when the court overturned that sentence for doubts about the veracity of the evidence and ordered a new trial, something very unusual in the Asian country.
The new ruling, announced by Judge Koshi Kunii of the Shizuoka Court (southwest Tokyo), acknowledged that there was falsification of evidence, on which Hakamada was charged by the prosecutor’s office and the investigating authorities in the case.
Hakamada, a former professional boxer born in Shizuoka in 1936, was sentenced to death for the 1966 murder of the owner of a miso factory (fermented soy) where he worked, his wife and their two children, and then burning their house.
The Shizuoka Court agreed to conduct a retrial after the defense team insisted that the evidence incriminating him was actually fabricated, specifically some clothes found in one of the miso tanks of the factory and stained with blood that matched his DNA.
This marks the fifth time in post-war Japan that a person sentenced to death has been acquitted after a retrial. The previous such instance occurred 35 years ago.
Hakamada, now aged 88 and with a weakened mental condition after spending nearly half a century behind bars, will receive compensation to be determined based on the years of imprisonment, provided there is no appeal from the prosecutor’s office. EFE
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