The Japanese government has ordered a retrial for an 87-year-old ex-boxer on the country's death row for more than five decades following his conviction of murder.
The decision of Tokyo's high court on Monday came as the defendant's lawyers said that the conviction was based on forced confession and fabricated evidence. Furthermore, the court said that the man, identified as Iwao Hakamada, deserves to undergo a new trial because investigators may have fabricated a critical piece of evidence that led to his conviction.
Japanese Man's Retrial
Hakamada has been out of prison since 2014 but is still not cleared of the murder charges when the Shizuoka District Court in central Japan decided to suspend his execution and order a new trial and release. However, the Tokyo High Court overturned that ruling until the Supreme Court ordered it to reconsider in 2020.
The defense lawyers rushed out of the courtroom and flashed banners that read "Retrial." In a statement, Hakamada's 90-year-old sister, Hideko, said they won the retrial after she devoted her life to proving that her brother was innocent of the crime, as Fox News.
The man was convicted for the 1966 killing of a company manager and three of his family members. He was also convicted of setting fire to the victims' home, where he was a live-in employee. Two years later, Japanese authorities sentenced him to death for the crime after he initially denied accusations and then confessed. He said he was forced to confess because of the police's violent interrogation.
He was not executed in the years to come because of the country's lengthy appeals and the retrial process. It took authorities 27 years to deny his first appeal for a retrial, and he filed his second in 2008, which the court finally ruled in his favor on Thursday.
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Fabricated Evidence
The point of Hakamada's contention in the case was five pieces of blood-stained clothing that investigators once said was allegedly worn by the defendant during the crime and later hidden inside a tank of fermented soybean paste or miso was found a year after his arrest.
The situation comes as the director of Amnesty International Japan, Hideaki Nakagawa, said the court's ruling was a "kong-overdue chance" at justice for Hakamada. According to Al Jazeera, he said that the defendant's conviction was not justified and raised serious concerns regarding the other pieces of evidence used against him.
The defendant is a former professional boxer who, at one time, ranked in sixth place in the country in the featherweight category. It was in 1957 when he became a professional at only 21 years old and later married his wife, who was a cabaret dancer and had one son with her.
The court's decision for a retrial comes amid scientific experiments that seemed to show clothing soaked in miso for more than a year turns too dark for blood stains to be visible, which led to concerns that the pieces of evidence were fabricated, said the Associated Press.
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