by Lorenzo Rossi
A pair of blood-soaked trousers and a confession extracted during a brutal interrogation: so, with these questionable elements, Iwao Hakamada, a former boxer, was sent to death row. It was 1968. Today, after almost fifty years spent waiting for the gallows, the Shizuoka district court declared him innocent. At 88, the world’s longest-serving man sentenced to death finally emerges from this nightmare, in one of the most controversial court cases in Japanese history.
Hakamada was arrested in 1966, accused of killing his employer, his wife and two of their children. Four people slaughtered with knives in a house in Shizuoka prefecture, which was then set on fire. The evidence? Five items of clothing found fourteen months after the crime, abandoned in a miso tub, with traces of blood which, according to the prosecution, matched those of the victims and of Hakamada himself.
Thus it was that a man, who had initially confessed under threat and then retracted in court, was sentenced to death. His fault: having succumbed to the pressure of a violent interrogation, in a judicial system that, even then, was beginning to show its cracks. A system that seemed more interested in finding a culprit than the truth.
Today, decades later, Japanese justice admits that it was wrong. The court ruled that the blood stains on the clothes could not have remained reddish after a year immersed in miso. A statement which, if it were not tragic, would have the flavor of a farce. “The bloodstains were processed and hidden by the authorities,” the judge ruled. “Mr. Hakamada is not guilty.”
With this sentence one of the longest and most shameful judicial events in the Land of the Rising Sun ends. A saga which, from 1968 to today, has attracted worldwide attention, highlighting not only the shadows of the Japanese penal system, but also the persistence of the death penalty in one of the few industrialized countries that has not yet abandoned this practice.
If there is one person who has never stopped believing in Hakamada’s innocence, it is his sister Hideko. Ninety-one years old, he dedicated his life to fighting for his brother’s freedom. “We fought for a long time,” he said, “but today we can finally see the light at the end of the tunnel.” A light that, for decades, seemed destined to go out.
The Hakamada case is just one of many examples of so-called “hostage justice”, as Teppei Kasai, a lawyer for Human Rights Watch Asia, defined it. A system that allows investigators to abuse their authority, extracting confessions through the use of force. And, despite everything, the death penalty in Japan enjoys widespread popular support, the only developed country, together with the United States, to still maintain the gallows. But perhaps, with this case, something is starting to move.
