A former boxer who spent longer on death row than any other prisoner in the world has become a cause célèbre for opponents of the death penalty in Japan.
Iwao Hakamada was convicted in 1966 of murdering his boss in Shizuoka, central JapanThe manager’s house had been set on fire and he, his wife and two children were found “stabbed to death,” said The ObserverHakamada was found guilty and sentenced to death by hanging in 1968. He has not left prison since.
A retrial was ordered in 2014 after some of the original evidence was deemed inconclusive. The trial finally began last October and Hakamada, now 88, maintained his innocence, saying he was “coerced into confessing” during 12 hours of interrogation. A decision on the retrial is expected in late September.
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The Iwao Hakamada case
In 1966, Hakamada was a factory worker in his 30s who had just retired from a successful boxing career. After his arrest, he was “interrogated for 20 days without a lawyer present,” said Amnesty InternationalThe confession signed by Hakamada “forms the basis of his conviction.”
Hakamada later retracted his testimony, saying he was “beaten, threatened and coerced into confessing.” The evidence against him was “questionable” and flimsy – but he was found guilty anyway. One of the judges at his trial believes Hakamada was wrongly convicted. “I felt extremely guilty that I had to convict an innocent man,” said Kumamoto Norimichi. “I still do to this day.” Six months after the trial, Kumamoto resigned from his position as judge.
In 2014, Hakamada was temporarily released from death row when the Shizuoka District Court granted him a retrial based on new DNA evidence. After prosecutors appealed, the decision was overturned by the Tokyo High Court – but the Supreme Court then “instructed the Supreme Court to reconsider the matter.” In March 2023, a retrial was given the green light, which began in October.
“Five blood-stained items of clothing” that Hakamada “allegedly wore at the time of the murders” are important evidence, said The Asahi Shimbun – but the High Court ruled that there was a “high probability that the evidence was not only falsified but also planted”.
The district court is due to decide on a retrial in September, but Hakamada “has always faced almost impossible odds,” according to The Observer. About 99 percent of all criminal cases tried in Japan end in a conviction.
Japan’s death row inmates
Japan is the only industrial democracy, apart from the USA, that still applies the death penalty. And it enjoys surprisingly high levels of public support – even more so since the sarin gas attack on a Tokyo subway in 1995, in which 13 people died. Seven members of the doomsday cult responsible for the attack were carried out in 2018.
A Opinion poll 2019 A survey of 3,000 adults conducted every five years by the country’s Cabinet Office found that nearly 81 percent of respondents believed the death penalty was necessary in some cases, while only 9 percent said it should be abolished in all cases.
But the punishment is rarely carried out. Since 2000, only 98 prisoners have been executed, most recently Tomohiro Kato (responsible for the 2008 Akihabara massacre) in 2022. Nevertheless, “there is little political will to abolish the death penalty to spare the 106 people currently on death row,” according to The Observer.
Human rights groups have criticised “Japan’s reliance on confessions, which they say the police often extract using force,” according to the BBC. Japan is also under international fire for the way it applies the punishment. Legally, executions must be carried out in “utmost secrecy,” according to the BBC. Death Penalty Information Center.
Inmates spend an average of 15 years on death row while their sentences are reviewed, usually in “strict solitary confinement.” “Prisoners are notified only one hour before their sentence is to be carried out, so their families and lawyers do not learn of the execution until after the fact.”
After 48 years in prison, during which Hakamada had to live with this threat, he has “serious psychological problems,” Amnesty International said. He was declared unfit to testify and released from the trial.
“Over the past ten years, I have watched Iwao-san and seen what the death penalty does to a person,” said Hideyo Ogawa, Hakamada’s defense attorney. “It’s as if he is not here with us, but in his own world.”
“I am forced to live with persistent grief that permeates my body,” Hakamada wrote in 1973. “My heart becomes indescribably cold from infinite fear of the unknown – execution.”
