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TOKYO (AFP): Japan’s highest court upheld a ruling granting a new trial to a man described as the world’s oldest death row inmate, a lawyer for the 84-year-old said on Wednesday (December 23). .
Iwao Hakamada has lived under a death sentence for more than half a century, after being found guilty of robbing and murdering his boss, the man’s wife, and their two teenage children.
But he and his supporters argue that he confessed to the crime after an allegedly brutal police questioning that included beatings, and that evidence was placed in the case.
He tried to retract his confession, but was sentenced to death in 1968, with the verdict upheld by the Supreme Court in 1980.
However, in a rare change of mind for Japan’s rigid justice system, a district court in the central city of Shizuoka in 2014 granted his request for a new trial.
The court said investigators could have presented evidence and ordered the former boxer’s release, adding that it was “unbearably unfair” to keep him in custody pending a retrial.
Prosecutors appealed that ruling and won in Tokyo High Court, prompting Hakamada to transfer the case to the Supreme Court, which on Wednesday ruled in his favor, supporting the retrial.
“The Supreme Court today made the decision to hold a retrial by overturning the Tokyo High Court decision to dismiss the request for a retrial,” Hakamada’s attorney, Yoshiyuki Todate, wrote on his blog.
“The fact that the way has not been cut off for the resumption of a new trial is very welcome. My hands are still shaking after hearing this. I am very, very happy.”
Supporters say that nearly 50 years in detention, most in solitary confinement with the constant threat of execution looming over him, severely affected Hakamada’s mental health.
In an interview with AFP in 2018, the former boxer said he felt like he was “fighting a fight every day.”
Japan is the only major industrialized democracy, besides the United States, that applies capital punishment, which still enjoys wide public support, although debate on the subject is rare.
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