Japanese court acquits former boxer of murder charge after decades on death row | Court news

Judge admits that Iwao Hakamada was wrongly convicted of murder in a miso factory in 1966.

A court in Japan has declared an 88-year-old former boxer innocent after he was wrongfully sentenced to death for murder in 1968.

The Shizuoka District Court on Thursday found Iwao Hakamada not guilty in a retrial for the quadruple murder of a company manager and three of his family members in 1966.

According to a report by Japanese broadcaster NHK, presiding judge Koshi Kunii said that the court admitted numerous instances of falsification of evidence and that Hakamada was not the perpetrator.

Hakamada was released in 2014 pending retrial. He spent 46 years on death row after making a forced confession to the murders at the miso (soy paste) factory where he was hired in 1965.

Hakamada initially denied murdering factory boss Fumio Hashiguchi, his wife and two teenage children, and setting fire to their house, but confessed after what he later described as a brutal police interrogation that included beatings.

At the heart of the trial was a set of bloodstained clothing that was found in a tank of miso a year after the 1966 murders and was used as evidence to incriminate Hakamada.

The defense accused investigators of a trap, saying the red spots on the clothing were too bright. However, the prosecution said its own experiments had shown the color to be believable.

Despite his death sentence, Hakamada was not executed due to lengthy appeals and retrial.

In 2014, he was temporarily released after new DNA evidence raised serious doubts about the credibility of his conviction.

The Tokyo High Court granted him a retrial last year, which began in October.

Hakamada was not present at his retrial, but his 91-year-old sister Hideko Hakamada, who had long fought for her brother's retrial, bowed deeply several times to the judge after the verdict was overturned.

Japan is, besides the United States, the only major industrial democracy that maintains the death penalty – a policy that enjoys broad public support.

With his acquittal, Hakamada becomes the fifth person sentenced to death in post-war Japan to be found not guilty in a retrial.