Hope for Japan's longest-serving death row inmate

Japan’s highest court has overturned a ruling blocking the retrial of a man described as the world’s longest-serving death row inmate, raising new hope for the 84-year-old, his lawyer said on Wednesday.

Iwao Hakamada has lived under a death sentence for more than half a century after being convicted of robbing and murdering his boss, the man’s wife, and their two teenaged children.

But he and his supporters say he confessed to the crime only after an allegedly brutal police interrogation that included beatings, and that evidence in the case was planted.

He tried to retract his confession, but was sentenced to death in 1968, with the verdict confirmed by the Supreme Court in 1980.

However, in a rare about-face for Japan’s rigid justice system, a district court in the central city of Shizuoka in 2014 granted his request for a retrial.

The court said investigators could have planted evidence and ordered the former boxer freed, adding it was “unbearably unjust” to keep him detained pending the new trial.

Prosecutors appealed that ruling, and won at the Tokyo High Court, prompting Hakamada to move the case to the Supreme Court, which yesterday reversed the high court decision.

“The Supreme Court made a decision today to uphold a retrial by overturning the decision by the Tokyo High Court to dismiss the request for retrial,” Hakamada’s lawyer Yoshiyuki Todate wrote on his blog.

“The fact that a path for the resumption of a retrial was not cut off is very welcome.”