This is the moment a Japanese police chief bowed solemnly and begged for forgiveness from a former boxer who was acquitted of murder after 50 years on death row.
Shizuoka Prefecture Police Chief Takayoshi Tsuda visited 88-year-old Iwao Hakamada at his home today to apologize after he was acquitted of a mass murder charge.
Mr. Tsuda said, standing directly in front of Mr. Hakamada and bowing deeply, “We are sorry for causing you unspeakable mental pain and burden for 58 years from the time of the arrest until the acquittal.”
“We are terribly sorry,” he added, assuring there would be a “close and appropriate investigation.”
The Shizuoka District Court acquitted Mr. Hakamada after he admitted that police and prosecutors worked together to fabricate and plant evidence against him.
Mr. Hakamada had initially pleaded not guilty to stabbing four people to death in 1966, but confessed after 264 hours of intense and often violent interrogations. He has since maintained that he was coerced and had no role in the killings.
Takayoshi Tsuda, left, apologizes to former Japanese death row inmate Iwao Hakamada
Takayoshi Tsuda visited 88-year-old Iwao Hakamada at his home today
Iwao Hakamada, center, sits next to his sister, right, as Tsuda came to his house to apologize
Mr Hakamada received the police chief together with his sister (photo right)
Iwao Hakamada as a young man. He spent most of his life in prison after being convicted of murdering four people in 1966. Mr Hakamada maintained his innocence
When the police chief entered the room, Mr. Hakamada silently rose from his couch to greet him.
Mr. Hakamada, struggling to hold a conversation due to his mental state resulting from decades of incarceration on death row, responded, “What it means to have the authority… Once you have the power, it You’re not supposed to grumble.’
Hakamada’s 91-year-old sister, who had stood by her brother during the long process to clear his name and now lives with him, thanked the police chief for her visit.
‘There’s no point in complaining to him after all these years. He was not involved in the case and only came here for his duty,” she told reporters afterwards.
“But I still accepted his visit only because I (my brother) clearly wanted to break with his past as a death row inmate.”
The verdict came more than half a century too late for Hakamada, who has spent most of his life behind bars since his arrest in 1966.
The former boxer had been charged with mass murder in a highly publicized case dubbed the ‘Hakamada incident’ after four bodies were found in the rubble of a house fire in Shizuoka, west of Tokyo.
Mr Hakamada’s employer, the employer’s wife and two children appeared to have been stabbed to death in the home.
Authorities accused him of killing the family, setting the house on fire and stealing 200,000 yen in cash.
Mr Hakamada, then an employee at the victim’s miso processing factory, denied robbing and killing the victims.
But he later confessed under coercive and violent interrogation.
Mr Hakamada said he could do “nothing but squat on the ground to avoid relieving himself” while he was being held.
“One of the interrogators put my thumb on an ink pad, traced a written confession with it and ordered me, ‘Write your name here!’ (while) yelling at me, kicking me and pulling my arm.”
Two years after the incident, he was convicted of murder and arson and sentenced to death.
Mr. Hakamata was ultimately not executed due to the lengthy appeal and retrial in Japan, and languished in prison for more than 50 years until last month, when he was acquitted in a retrial.
Japan often notifies death row inmates of their execution several minutes early, leaving Hakamata unsure of his fate for decades.
He holds the record as the world’s longest-serving death row inmate.
His lawyers continued to fight on his behalf, arguing that DNA recovered from apparent bloodstained clothing used to incriminate him did not match.
Judge Hiroaki Murayama acknowledged in 2014 that “the clothing was not that of the suspect.”
Kumamoto Norimichi, one of three judges in his case, said during the trial that he did not believe there was enough evidence to convict him.
“Looking at the evidence, there was almost nothing other than the confession, and it was taken under intense interrogation,” he said.
Norimichi resigned after failing to convince the other two judges.
Former Japanese death row inmate Iwao Hakamada (left) and his sister Hideko Hakamada attend a rally of supporters on October 14, 2024 in Shizuoka, central Japan
Hideko Hakamada, left, sister of former boxer Iwao Hakamada helps her brother, in 2021
Iwao Hakamada is welcomed by supporters as he arrives in Hamamatsu, Shizuoka Prefecture, central Japan, on May 27, 2014
It took almost thirty years for the Supreme Court to deny Hakamada’s first request for a new trial. His second request for a new trial, filed by his sister in 2008, was granted in 2014.
The court ordered his release from his solitary cell on death row, but without vacating his conviction, pending the retrial.
Mr. Hakamada was the world’s longest-serving death row inmate and only the fifth death row inmate to be acquitted in a retrial in postwar Japan, where criminal trials take years and retrials are extremely rare.
His case and acquittal have led to calls for more transparency in the investigation, legal changes to lower the threshold for a retrial and debate on the death penalty in Japan.