Crime & justice

Japan's Longest Death Row Inmate Awarded $1.4M After Acquittal

MAR 25 2025·Updated MAR 26 2025

Story

Above: Iwao Hakamada (L) and his sister Hideko leave after a press conference in Tokyo on Nov. 25, 2019. Image credit: Kazuhiro Nogi/Contributor/AFP via Getty Images

The Facts

Iwao Hakamada, an 89-year-old former boxer, was on Monday awarded ¥217M ($1.45M) in compensation by the Shizuoka District Court for spending over 46 years wrongfully imprisoned. This is the largest criminal compensation in Japanese history.
Guardian
South China Morning Post
Hakamada was initially convicted in 1968 for the 1966 murders of his boss, the boss' wife, and their two teenage children at a miso factory. He spent most of his detention on death row — making him the longest-serving death row inmate in Japanese history — before being released in 2014 pending retrial.
Al Jazeera
New York Post
The court's final acquittal in September 2024 acknowledged that police had fabricated evidence, including blood-stained clothes found in a miso tank, and that Hakamada's confession was obtained through coercive interrogations lasting up to 12 hours daily.
The Japan Times
BBC News
The compensation represents ¥12.5K ($83) for each day of detention. However, Hakamada's legal team argues this amount falls short of compensating for the severe mental and physical suffering he endured during his imprisonment.
Mainichi
South China Morning Post
Hakamada's 91-year-old sister Hideko devoted half her life to proving his innocence, leading a decades-long campaign that ultimately resulted in his release and subsequent acquittal.
The Japan Times
New York Post
Japan remains one of only two G7 nations maintaining the death penalty. According to Amnesty International, 144 countries had abolished the death penalty in law or practice as of 2023.
The Japan Times
Kyodo News+
Amnesty International

Sources Split

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The Spin

Narrative A

Through this historic compensation and acknowledgment of wrongdoing, the Japanese justice system has demonstrated its ability to correct past wrongs, setting an important precedent for future cases of wrongful conviction and showing a commitment to justice reform.

The Japan Times

Mainichi

Narrative B

The decades-long struggle to secure a retrial and the severe mental toll on Hakamada reveal fundamental flaws in Japan's criminal justice system, including the use of forced confessions and the extremely high hurdles for obtaining retrials, necessitating urgent reform of the current legal framework.

BBC News

New York Post