Hakamada case: World's longest-serving death row inmate acquitted in Japan

Yesterday, an 88-year-old man, Iwao Hakamada, was finally acquitted of robbery and four murders in Japan after a legal struggle lasting more than 50 years. The case has received international media attention, as Hakamada became the world’s longest-serving (and surviving) death row inmate, having spent 46 years facing execution.

For many people, hearing that Japan retains the death penalty and executes its citizens on a fairly regular basis will be surprising, given its reputation as a gentle, tolerant and respectful society with one of the world’s lowest crime rates. Hakamada’s story, a contemporary nightmare, paints a different picture of Japan, with a death penalty that subjects people to a cruel existence that no human being should ever endure and a criminal justice system that rarely admits that mistakes are made.

The majority of Hakamada’s 46 years on death row were spent in solitary confinement, subject to 24/7 surveillance. In Japan, executions are carried out in secrecy, so the inmate is only told one hour before they are due to be hanged. The prisoner’s family is only informed of the execution after it has been carried out. For Hakamada, each day on death row was a recurring nightmare and each could have been his last – inevitably, these decades of solitary confinement and the daily threat of his execution took a heavy toll on his mental health.

On his arrest in 1966, Hakamada denied that he had robbed and murdered the four victims, but after being interrogated by the police and prosecutors without a lawyer present, for more than 264 hours over a 23-day period, he eventually admitted to committing the crime. It is little surprise that Hakamada proferred a false confession – human rights groups have described pretrial detention in Japan as a ‘hostage justice system’; where suspects are questioned without the presence of a lawyer, the right to silence remains illusory rather than a reality and allegations of coerced confessions are not uncommon. Almost everyone prosecuted is convicted: judges approved 94.7% of prosecutors’ requests for pretrial detention in 2020 and the conviction rate at trial was 99.8%.

In yesterday’s decision, the presiding judge at Shizuoka District Court, Koshi Kunii, acknowledged that three pieces of evidence had been fabricated, including Hakamada’s ’confession’ and items of clothing that prosecutors claimed he had been wearing at the time of the murders.

The court found that “Investigators tampered with clothes by getting blood on them” and criticised the use of “inhumane interrogations meant to force a statement … by imposing mental and physical pain.”

The Court further stated that “The prosecution’s records were obtained by effectively infringing on the defendant’s right to remain silent, under circumstances extremely likely to elicit a false confession.”

Hakamada was initially released from death row in 2014, when the Shizuoka High Court quashed his conviction. He was 32 years old when sentenced to death for a crime he did not commit, but he left prison as a 78-year-old man. That decade saw considerable legal wrangling, with the prosecutors continuing to insist on his guilt and the appropriateness of the death penalty, notwithstanding that Hakamada is now 88 years old. 

This case begs the question as to why the Japanese criminal justice system has been so reluctant to accept the overwhelming evidence that Hakamada was wrongly convicted. Has it been an attempt to preserve the legitimacy of the death penalty? No criminal justice system is beyond reproach – police, prosecutors and judges need to own up to their mistakes, especially where the death penalty exists. The alternative is a lethal culture of denial: hostile and resistant to legitimate scrutiny.

The government maintain that there are high levels of public support for the death penalty in Japan – its primary justification for retention. In their last public opinion poll, the government found that 80% of respondents viewed the death penalty as unavoidable. But how reliable is this evidence when public awareness of the death penalty is minimal given the secrecy surrounding it? As Sato and Bacon (2015) found in their survey of public opinion, only 51% of respondents were aware that the method of execution is by hanging. On the one hand, the government justify their continued use of the death penalty on the basis of public support, yet the public do not even have basic knowledge about the death penalty and what is involved. The reliability of the government’s survey’s is also called into question, as the simple ‘for or against’ question the government poses to the public overlooks important nuances and complexities in public attitudes which have been investigated by more rigorous and methodologically sound studies. Sato and Bacon’s in-depth and nuanced analysis of the government’s survey reveals that notwithstanding the 80% support for the death penalty, the majority of the public would in fact accept abolition if the government would change its stance on the death penalty. The relevance of public opinion as a barrier to abolition is widely exaggerated or misinterpreted in the context of policy discussions.

Cases like Hakamada’s will happen again. The evidence globally is that error is inevitable; miscarriages of justice can never be entirely eliminated from any criminal justice system. The number of wrongful convictions in any country depends not only on how many cases of innocence have been established, but critically how effectively these cases are identified. The problem in Japan may well be bigger than Hakamada’s case. He is only the fifth person to be released from death row in the past few decades. Of the 106 people currently on death row in Japan, 61 are currently requesting retrials, yet the United Nations have expressed concern that executions have been carried out whilst appeals are still pending. Hakamada's and other similar cases in Japan came after long and brutal interrogations that led to false confessions and in all, the Japanese appeals process was slow and reluctant to recognise the risks of wrongful conviction arising from abuses of due process.

A salient lesson from Hakamada’s tragic case is that Japan needs to accept the problem of actual innocence within its own criminal justice system and urgently reconsider its use of the death penalty, or at the very least improve procedural safeguards and the appellate process. One also wonders if the Hakamada case will make people question whether the death penalty is still appropriate.

The legacy of this appalling human tragedy must be a change in the government’s stance on the future of capital punishment. Rather than using public opinion as an excuse for retaining the death penalty, political leaders in Japan should exercise their judgement based on an informed and rationale appreciation of the case for abolition, recognising that no justice system can be perfect. A G7 country, Japan is viewed as economically advanced, industrious and democratic, with strong institutions. After the Hakamada case, people may well regard its criminal justice institutions as cruel and unfair.   

Saul Lehrfreund is Co-Executive Director of The Death Penalty Project.

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Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under Creative Commons BY-SA 3.0.