56 years on death row
Execution candidate (88) acquitted in Japan
He spent more than half a century on death row as an innocent man - now 88-year-old Iwao Hakamada is a free man. The Japanese man is considered to be the prisoner who has been on death row the longest in the world.
Hakamada was sentenced to death in 1968 for the murder of his boss and his family. The former boxer made a confession after weeks of police interrogation, but later recanted it. He stated that he had been forced to make the confession during the brutal interrogations. He also stated that the evidence had been falsified.
New trial was a surprise
Nevertheless, the death sentence was confirmed by the Supreme Court in 1980. In 2014, a district court then surprisingly ordered that Hakamada be given a new trial. He was released pending the retrial.
Now the district court in Shizuoka, Japan, declared the former boxer innocent on Thursday.
The almost five decades spent on death row, mostly in solitary confinement, have taken their toll on Hakamada psychologically. Apart from the United States, Japan is the only major democratic industrialized nation in which death sentences are still carried out.
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