Japanese court acquits a former boxer in a 1966 murder retrial after decades on death row

TOKYO (AP) — A Japanese court ruled Thursday that an 88-year-old former boxer was not guilty in a retrial for a 1966 quadruple murder, reversing an earlier wrongful conviction after decades on death row, Japanese broadcaster NHK reported.

Iwao Hakamada’s acquittal by the Shizuoka District Court makes him the fifth death-row convict to be found not guilty in a retrial in postwar Japanese criminal justice. The court’s presiding judge, Koshi Kunii, said the court acknowledged a multiple fabrications of evidence and that Hakamada was not the culprit, NHK said.

He was convicted of murder in the 1966 killing of a company manager and three of his family members, and setting a fire to their central Japan home. He was sentenced to death in 1968, but was not executed due to lengthy appeals and the retrial process.

It took 27 years for the top court to deny his first appeal for retrial. His second appeal for a retrial was filed in 2008 by his sister Hideko Hakamada, now 91, and the court finally ruled in his favor in 2023, paving the way for the latest retrial that began in October.

Hakamada was released from prison in 2014 when a court ordered a retrial based on new evidence suggesting his conviction may have been based on fabricated accusations by investigators, but was not cleared of the conviction.

Before that, Hakamada had already spent 48 years behind bars — most of them on death row — making him the world’s longest-serving death row inmate.