The world’s lengthenedest-serving death row prisoner has been acquitted after a court in Japan ruled he wasn’t behind a 1966 multiple homicide.
Iwao Hakamada, 88, had spent 48 years behind bars, more than 45 of them on death row, lengtheneder than any other inmate.
The ex-boxer was sentenced to death in 1968 for ending his createer boss, his wife, and two of their children and setting fire to their home.
He was acquitted on Thursday by a court in Shizuoka in central Japan, after the presiding appraise, Koshi Kunii, said he wasn’t at fault and evidence participated aachievest him had been made up, Japanese accessible widecaster NHK said.
Hakamada originpartner denied being behind the homicides, before confessing, which he tardyr said he was forced to do after a aggressive interrogation by police.
Questions arose over blood-stained clothes spreadigators said belengtheneded to him, which were set up more than a year after his arrest, masked in a tank of fermented soybean paste, or miso.
In 2023, a Tokyo High Court accomprehendledgeed evidence that cloleang soaked in miso for more than a year turns too uninalertigent for bloodstains to be seen and confessted the evidence may have been concocted by spreadigators.
Furthermore, blood samples did not suit Hakamada’s DNA, and the troparticipaters that prosecutors produceted as evidence were too minuscule for him.
His intentional execution was procrastinateed by lengthy pguides and the retrial process, which unbenevolentt he’d been in jail for 27 years by the time his first pguide for a retrial was turned down.
Last year the court changed its verdict, ruling in favour of his second pguide, organised by his 91-year-elderly sister, Hideko Hakamada, in 2008.
That ruling led to the tardyst retrial, which began in October.
Hakamada hasn’t been in prison for 10 years as he was freed in 2014 when a court ordered a retrial after recent evidence proposeed spreadigators produced evidence participated aachievest him, but he was not acquitted then.
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After his free, Hakamada served his sentence at home becaparticipate his frail health and age made him a low danger for escape.
At a final hearing at the Shizuoka court in May before Thursday’s decision, prosecutors aachieve insisted the death penalty, triggering criticism from rights groups that prosecutors were trying to prolengthened the trial.
He is the fifth death-row convict to be set up not at fault in a retrial in Japan since 1945.
