More than 50 years after he was indicted on charges of quadruple murder in one of Japan's most controversial legal cases, a court on Tuesday acquitted an 88-year-old former professional boxer. The retrial of Iwao Hakamada , who spent 46 years behind bars before new evidence got him released in 2014, began last October at the Shizuoka District Court, with prosecutors seeking the death sentence. It is the fifth time in postwar Japan that retrials have ended in acquittal after the death penalty was imposed.

For 46 years, every day Hakamada risked being taken to the hanging room. He was considered the man who waited the longest to be executed in the world. "Was" because from today he can be considered a free man : a review process has finally acquitted him, throwing the judicial system and the practice of the Japanese death penalty into crisis.

Attention now turns to whether prosecutors will appeal today's ruling again. Over the past nine years, local media note, Hakamada's mental state has deteriorated due to his lengthy detention , with signs of psychological fatigue appearing around 1980, when his death sentence was finalized. His sister, now 91, has always attended the hearings on her brother's behalf.

The former boxer was an employee of a miso paste company when he was arrested in 1966 on charges of killing his employer, his wife and two of their children . The four were found dead from stab wounds in their home in Shizuoka Prefecture, which was later set on fire. Indicted for murder, robbery and arson, his death sentence was finalized after blood traces on five items of clothing found in a vat of miso 14 months after the murder matched the blood types of the victims and Hakamada himself.

The latter initially confessed to the murders following what he described as a brutal police interrogation , but at the trial he pleaded not guilty . According to lawyer Teppei Kasai, head of Human Rights Watch Asia, interviewed by the AFP agency, the case of Hakamada is "just one of countless examples of the Japanese system of 'hostage justice', which documents how criminal suspects suffer serious abuse in pre-trial detention and intimidation during interrogation".

Japan is the only major industrialized democracy other than the United States to practice capital punishment, a policy that enjoys broad public support.

(Online Union)

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