Japanese supreme court grants retrial to 84-year-old known as world’s longest death-row inmate

Iwao Hakamada in 2014, when he was first granted a retrial

Credit: Jiji Press/AFP

Japan’s highest court has upheld a ruling granting a retrial to a man described as the world’s longest-serving death row inmate, a lawyer for the 84-year-old said on Wednesday.

Iwao Hakamada has lived under a death sentence for more than half a century, after being convicted of robbing and murdering his boss, the man’s wife, and their two teenaged children. 

Mr Hakamada had confessed to the crime but later recanted in court citing his allegedly brutal police interrogation and planted evidence.

In a rare about-face for Japan’s rigid justice system, a district court in the central city of Shizuoka in 2014 granted his request for a retrial.

The court said investigators could have planted evidence and ordered the former boxer freed.

Prosecutors appealed the ruling and won at the Tokyo High Court, prompting Mr Hakamada to move the case to the Supreme Court, which on Wednesday ruled in his favour, backing the retrial.

An undated photograph of a young Mr Hakamada

Credit: Kyodo News/AP Photo

"The fact that a path for the resumption of a retrial was not cut off is very welcome. My hands are still shaking after hearing this. I’m really, really glad," Mr Hakamada’s lawyer Yoshiyuki Todate wrote on his blog.

Mr Hakamada was initially able to win a retrial after one of the judges at his original hearings came forward in 2007 to say he supported his campaign. 

Norimichi Kumamoto was one of the panel of three judges that the boxer guilty. His not-guilty vote was overruled by the two more senior judges, both of whom have since died.

"I felt instinctively that there was something wrong, mainly because it took the police 22 days to extract the confession from Hakamada," said Mr Kumamoto as he announced his support for a retrial. 

The police did have other evidence, although prosecutors would have been hard-pressed to hang a credible case on it. The clothes they said Mr Hakamada had worn to commit the crime did not fit him, while the weapon with which he allegedly killed the family did not match the wounds on the bodies.