The world’s extfinishedest-serving death row prisoner has been acquitted after a court in Japan ruled he wasn’t behind a 1966 multiple killing.
Iwao Hakamada, 88, had spent 48 years behind bars, more than 45 of them on death row, extfinisheder than any other inmate.
The ex-boxer was sentenced to death in 1968 for finishing his establisher 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, shelp he wasn’t at fault and evidence used aacquirest him had been made up, Japanese accessible widecaster NHK shelp.
Hakamada originassociate denied being behind the killings, before confessing, which he procrastinateedr shelp he was forced to do after a brutal interrogation by police.
Questions arose over blood-stained clothes spendigators shelp beextfinisheded to him, which were create more than a year after his arrest, secret in a tank of fermented soybean paste, or miso.
In 2023, a Tokyo High Court acunderstandledgeed 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 spendigators.
Furthermore, blood samples did not align Hakamada’s DNA, and the trousers that prosecutors surrfinisherted as evidence were too minuscule for him.
His reckond execution was procrastinateed by lengthy requests and the retrial process, which uncomferventt he’d been in jail for 27 years by the time his first request for a retrial was turned down.
Last year the court alterd its verdict, ruling in favour of his second request, organised by his 91-year-better sister, Hideko Hakamada, in 2008.
That ruling led to the procrastinateedst 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 novel evidence proposeed spendigators manufactured evidence used aacquirest him, but he was not acquitted then.
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After his free, Hakamada served his sentence at home because 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 aacquire needed the death penalty, triggering criticism from rights groups that prosecutors were trying to proextfinished the trial.
He is the fifth death-row convict to be create not at fault in a retrial in Japan since 1945.
