He spent more than half a century innocently on death row; now 88-year-old Iwao Hakamada is a free man. The Japanese is considered the longest-serving prisoner on death row in the world.
Hakamada was sentenced to death in 1968 for the murder of his boss and his family. The former boxer confessed after weeks of police interrogation, but later retracted it. He said he was forced to confess during brutal interrogations. He also stated that the evidence was falsified.
The new process was a surprise
Nevertheless, the death sentence was upheld by the Supreme Court in 1980. In 2014, a district court unexpectedly ordered Hakamada to be retried. He was released pending a new trial.
Now the court in Shizuoka, Japan, has declared the former boxer innocent on Thursday.
The nearly five decades he spent on death row, mostly in solitary confinement, took a heavy psychological toll on Hakamada. Along with the United States, Japan is the only major democratic industrial nation that still carries out capital punishment.
Source: Krone
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