Iwao Hakamada’s is one of those devastating, tragic stories with an unexpectedly happy ending that’s hard to imagine outside the pages of the latest serial detective novel. black A script from Netflix or Hollywood.

In 1968, at the age of 30, a Japanese court found him guilty. four murders and a firecrimes for which he was sentenced to death. The remaining half century of this former boxer’s life was spent behind bars, isolated and in constant fear that someone would knock on his door to take him to the gallows.

Hakamada, now 88, managed to get the court to declare him innocent without spending the last decade in prison because of doubts about his case. The Japanese newspaper says he did it Asashiassuming that the three main pieces of evidence used to prosecute him are probably already available almost 60 years It was “fabricated,” including Hakamada’s own incriminating confession.

Dating back to 1966

To understand its history, we have to go back to 1966, when police found the bodies of a man, his wife and their two teenage children in a house in Shizuoka, west of Tokyo. They had been stabbed to death. The first of them, a man, was the manager of a miso factory and investigations revealed that one of his employees was a 30-year-old former boxer. Your name: Iwao Hakamada.

He was arrested two months after the murders and the fire. The sentence came in 1968. The Shizuoka District Court found him guilty of the crimes and sentenced him to the maximum penalty of hanging. There were two main pieces of evidence in his case: a confession and some bloody clothes that allegedly belonged to Hakamada. It took some time for agents to make a contribution to the case. They were not found hidden in a miso tank until a year after the boxer’s arrest.

Despite the severity of the sentence and the judicial blows he received, Hakamada’s family did not give up. There was one unsuccessful objection Before the Supreme Court and a request for a repetition of the hearing before the Supreme Court in 1981. That instance also rejected the initiatives of his lawyers.

In 2008, forty years after the initial conviction, the defense finally appeared to have achieved its goal, casting serious doubt on the validity of the evidence the prosecution had presented against the boxer. The focus was on the clothes with blood on them.

The lawyers recalled that when the tissues stored in the miso tank were found, the blood stains still retained their reddish color. It may seem like a small problem, but it proved to be very important. Why? The lawyers raised an important question: How did they maintain this tone after being stored in the tank for a year? “They are not from Hakamada,” they concluded.

Another key is admission.

The former boxer confessed to his crimes after being subjected to brutal interrogations that lasted up to 12 hours a day for almost three weeks and included beatings, his lawyers later claimed. When the trial began, Hakamada once again claimed his innocence. In this case, there were more clues that did not match Hakamada’s, such as DNA on the tank top, according to the defense.

The arguments that the boxer was innocent, or at least that he cast doubt on the 1968 trial, were strong enough that Judge Hiroaki Murayama ruled in 2014 that it was “unfair” to keep him on death row. “The possibility of innocence has clearly emerged” to a respectable degree“Hakamada was released and awaits a new trial.

Now his 91-year-old sister is looking after him. She says Hakamada is no longer in prison, but he still carries a heavy burden from his years behind bars. Guard: Physical and mental deterioration resulting from prolonged captivity constant threat from execution. He was not even required to testify at the hearings for the new trial. The court exempted him from this obligation precisely because of his fragile mental state.

Neither the length of the trial nor Hakamada’s age allowed the wheels of the judicial system to accelerate. The new trial did not open until March 2023, and the sentence did not arrive until now, when the court acquitted him. Not only that. The court annulled the sentence that had kept the former prisoner on death row for almost half a century, considering that it was based on evidence that showed that everything, including the confession in 1966, was “fabricated.”

Questions remain as to whether prosecutors will appeal. new decisionHakamada’s lawyers had already asked for him to abstain, given his age.

The case is much more important (and more important to the media) than its details, how the case unfolded, or the years the former boxer spent in prison. Retrials of death row inmates are not common in Japan.

Hakamada’s case is actually the fifth in Japan’s recent history since the war. Despite the infamous nature of his case and the fact that the country is one of the few countries in the G7 to carry out the death penalty, public support for the death penalty is high. A 2019 government survey found that nearly 80% of respondents thought it was “inevitable.”

Images | Amnesty International, Ethan Wilkinson (Unsplash) and Tim Photoguy (Unsplash)

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