The world’s longest-serving death row inmate has finally been proved innocent and is free

Iwao Hakamanda, an inmate from Japan accused of mass murder, has been proved innocent after a long 56 years on death row for a crime he didn’t commit. At aged 88, he is a free man with no criminal record.

Back in 1966, he was accused and found guilty of the murder of his boss and his boss’s family, including his wife and two children. Iwao Hakamanda, who was a professional boxer at the time, had been working at a miso processing plant when all of the families’ bodies were retrieved from a fire at their home in Tokyo, Japan. After inspection, it was revealed that all four of the deceased had been stabbed to death.

Iwao Hakamanda denied all accusations against him, but unfortunately he was sentenced to death after eventually confessing. He later claimed that he was coerced into the confession he made. While on death row, he spent 48 years locked up awaiting execution. This led him to become the worlds longest ever serving death row inmate.

via JAPAN POOL/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock

It took him a whopping 27 years for Tokyo’s top court to deny his first retrial appeal, and his second retrial was filed in 2008 by his sister, Hideko Hakamanda, who is now 91.

In 2023, the court ruled that could be retrialed, which took began in October of last year.

One of the main arguments against Iwao Hakamanda were that he was wearing blood-stained clothes during the crime and hid away in a tank of fermented soybean paste. The clothes were actually found a year after his arrest, labelled as his and were a big part in what deemed him as guilty.

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However, we now live in a world of DNA testing, and defence lawyers claimed that the blood samples on the bloody clothes did not match Iwao’s DNA. They also said that the trousers were too small for him and he couldn’t even put them on when he tried.

Iwao Hakamanda has actually been living out the rest of his sentence at home since 2014, when a court ordered a retrial to find out if his previous conviction was based on false information. He was able to return to his home as he was deemed a low risk of escape, being much older and in weak health.

What’s crazy is that at his final hearing in May, people were STILL calling for the death penalty to be implemented for Iwao. It seems like his case has stirred up a lot of legal system discussion in Japan.

via Aflo/Shutterstock

Nonetheless, he was found innocent today after a court found him not guilty of the crimes he was originally made a inmate on death row for from 1966. He’s finally free!

Hideko, Iwao’s sister, has spent a huge amount of her life trying to prove her brother is innocent and free him from being a death row prisoner. In Tokyo, she spoke about the process with reporter: “It is so difficult to get a retrial started. Not just Iwao, but I’m sure there are other people who have been wrongly accused and crying.

“I want the criminal law revised so that retrials are more easily available.”

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Featured image via Aflo/Shutterstock.