Japan has awarded Iwao Hakamada, a man wrongfully convicted and held on death row for nearly half a century, 217 million yen (approximately $1.44 million) in compensation, Al Jazeera reports.
The payment, ordered by a court on Monday, is reportedly the highest criminal compensation ever granted in Japan, according to Hakamada’s legal team.
Hakamada, a former boxer now 89 years old, was released last year after his conviction for a 1966 quadruple murder was overturned in a retrial. He spent 46 years in detention, the majority of that time on death row, and the court awarded him 12,500 yen ($83) for each day of his incarceration.
The Shizuoka district court quashed Hakamada’s conviction following a relentless campaign by his sister and supporters. The court found that police had tampered with evidence related to the 1966 murder of his former employer and the employer’s family.
Hakamada initially confessed to the crime but later retracted his confession during his first trial, claiming he was subjected to abusive interrogation techniques over a period of 20 days.
Despite the unprecedented size of the compensation, Hakamada’s legal team argues that the sum falls far short of adequately compensating him for the immense suffering he endured. As the world’s longest-serving death row inmate, Hakamada spent decades in solitary confinement under the constant threat of execution.
His lawyers have stated that the decades of detention severely impacted Hakamada’s mental health, describing him as now “living in a world of fantasy.”
Hakamada is only the fifth death row inmate in Japan’s post-war history to be granted a retrial. Notably, all four previous cases also resulted in exonerations.
Japan remains one of the few leading industrialized democracies, along with the United States, that still practices capital punishment.
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