An innocent man on death row for 46 years. Is this the world’s greatest miscarriage of justice?

March 10, 2011 was Iwao Hakamada’s 75th birthday. It was also the day he celebrated a rather grim milestone – Guinness World Records certifying him as the world’s longest-held death row inmate.  Inmate no more, however. This week – more than 56 years after his conviction, 46 of which were spent facing the death penalty – he was cleared of his crimes, in a trial that has gripped Japan and rekindled debate about the use of capital punishment.

Hakamada, now 88, was just 30 years old when he was arrested and charged with the murder of his boss, the man’s wife and their two teenage children, after they were found stabbed to death in their home in Shizuoka, central Japan, on June 30, 1966.

According to his lawyers, Hakamada was interrogated for a total of 264 hours, for as many as 16 hours a session, over 23 days, to obtain a confession. Hakamada, a former professional boxer, later retracted his confession and consistently protested his innocence. But at his trial in 1968, prosecutors presented five pieces of bloody clothing that were allegedly found in a tank at the miso factory where he worked. Hakamada was found guilty and sentenced to death.

All his requests for an appeal and a retrial were denied, but his death warrant was never signed. It was only in 2007, when one of the judges who had convicted Hakamada in 1968 expressed his doubts and guilt over the sentence he’d passed, that a campaign to retry Hakamada gained momentum.

In 2008, a DNA test suggested that the blood on the clothing used as evidence did not match Hakamada’s. He was freed from prison in 2014 when new evidence emerged, and a retrial was ordered. Hakamada, who was baptised while in prison with the Christian name of Paulo, was invited to a Mass in Tokyo during Pope Francis’s visit in 2019. But it wasn’t until this week that he was finally found not guilty, 58 years after his arrest.

This astonishing case has shone a light on what human rights’ charities have called Japan’s “hostage justice system”. At the moment, police can detain suspects for up to several months or over a year, with no lawyers present, in order to obtain confessions. Conviction rates exceed 99 per cent.

The last execution in Japan was carried out on July 26 2022, and in that case a retrial was still actively being sought. Since 2000, the country has executed 93 inmates, who are only notified of their hanging a few hours or even minutes in advance. Executions are carried out in secrecy and although Japan began disclosing the names of those executed in 2007, details are still limited.

“Iwao Hakamada spent every day for 46 years thinking it could be his last,” says Saul Lehrfreund, co-executive director of The Death Penalty Project, an NGO which offers free legal representation to people on death row around the world. “He’s been through an unimaginable ordeal, with more than 30 years in solitary confinement and under constant surveillance.”

Lehrfreund says that Hakamada’s case is hugely significant, not just because of the record-breaking number of years an innocent man has served behind bars, but because certain features of the case should be “sending alarm bells ringing in Japan”.

“This is a case where someone was forced to confess and evidence was fabricated,” says Lehrfreund. “It would be easy to say ‘OK this happened in 1966, this is a product of its time’, but in fact many features in this case still exist in Japan’s criminal justice system today and Hakamada’s is not an isolated case.”

Lehrfreund points out that the US (the only other G7 country to enforce the death penalty) has what’s called “super-due process”, meaning that its death penalty cases are subject to heightened standards of exactness. In Japan there is no such policy, and of the 106 people currently on death row there, 61 are requesting retrials.

“The reality is that there is no such thing as a perfect criminal justice system, so if you have the death penalty you’re accepting the risk that you will execute innocent people,” says Lehrfreund. “This case needs to make Japan take a long hard look at whether they’re ready to take that risk. The Japanese government says it regularly polls the public and that 80 per cent ‘consider the death penalty unavoidable’, and yet reputable academics have found that if you ask a different question, such as ‘Should the death penalty be abolished?’ then 71 per cent are in favour of abolition.”

Hakamada was pardoned before his death warrant was signed, but not all wrongfully convicted prisoners live to see their convictions overturned. Inevitably, miscarriages with terrible consequences have occurred across the world. Since 1987, China has executed three men – Teng Xingshan, Nie Shubin and Huugjilt – whom it later transpired had never committed the murders they were convicted of. The exact numbers of people executed in China is officially a state secret but while rates have been falling in recent years, politically motivated executions remain a feature.

In 1997, Taiwan executed Chiang Kuo-ching, an air force pilot who had been tortured for 37 hours to extract a confession for the rape and murder of a five-year-old girl. In 2011, another man confessed to the crime and Chiang was posthumously acquitted. Ma Ying-jeou, Taiwan’s president, apologised to Chiang’s family, who were awarded £2.1 million in compensation.

There are also plenty of cases of people who have died of natural causes while trying to appeal their wrongful convictions. In 2015, Romeo Phillion died at the age of 76 before his $14 million lawsuit against the Ontario government had been settled. He had been convicted in 1972 for the murder of an Ottawa firefighter, after an eyewitness wrongfully identified him. He served 31 years in prison, the longest ever sentence served by a Canadian prisoner whose conviction was later overturned.

In the US, 200 people have been exonerated from death row since 1972. One of the most notorious cases was that of Henry McCollum and Leon Brown. These two half-brothers from North Carolina were awarded a record-breaking £53 million settlement in 2021 after serving more than three decades in prison for a crime they did not commit. The black, intellectually disabled men were just teenagers when sentenced to death for the 1983 rape and murder of 11-year-old Sabrina Buie. Convicted based on false confessions obtained through coercion, DNA evidence eventually proved their innocence. They were exonerated in 2014 and granted pardons of innocence in 2015.

The UK has witnessed plenty of tragic miscarriages of justice, too. One of the most famous dates back to 1950, when Timothy Evans, from Wales, was convicted and hanged for the murder of his wife and daughter in their flat in Notting Hill. It later transpired that his neighbour, John Christie, was a serial killer who had murdered at least eight women, including Evans’s family. Evans finally received a royal pardon in 1966, and the case was influential in leading to the abolition of capital punishment in the UK in 1969.

But that was too late for Derek Bentley, who was just 19 years old when he was sentenced to death, and hanged in 1953 for the murder of a policeman during a robbery that went wrong. The jury found him guilty based in large part on Bentley’s ambiguous phrase “let him have it”, which prosecutors argued was an order to shoot, and the defence counsel argued was an order to surrender. After a 40-year-long campaign, Bentley received a posthumous pardon and his murder conviction was quashed in 1998.

But there have also been examples of grave miscarriages of justice more recently, too. In 2023, the UK Court of Appeal overturned the rape conviction of Andrew Malkinson, who had spent 17 years in prison. Barry George spent eight years behind bars before he was cleared of the murder of Jill Dando in 2008. Campaigner Winston Trew – one of the “Oval Four” – had a decades-long fight to clear his name, after he was one of four black men arrested and imprisoned by police at Oval tube station in 1972, supposedly on suspicion of stealing passengers’ handbags.

Hopefully, Hakamada’s ordeal is done. There was no immediate decision on whether prosecutors would challenge the ruling, but given Hakamada’s age, his defence lawyers have urged them not to. If his acquittal is finalised, Hakamada would be entitled to seek compensation.

But it’s hard to put a price on spending 46 years on death row for a crime you didn’t commit. Hakamada was too frail to appear in court this week, but his 91-year-old sister, Hideko, who has campaigned tirelessly on behalf of her brother, told reporters before the verdict: “For so long we have fought a battle that has felt endless. But this time, I believe it will be settled.”