Japan awards world s longest serving death row inmate record 1 87m after exoneration

TOKYO - A Japanese man wrongly convicted of murder who was the world’s longest-serving death row inmate has been awarded US$1.4 million (S$1.87 million) in compensation, an official said on March 25.

The payout represents 12,500 yen (S$110) for each day of the more than four decades that Mr Iwao Hakamada spent in detention, most of it on death row where each day could have been his last.

The former boxer, now 89, was exonerated in 2024 of a 1966 quadruple murder after a tireless campaign by his sister and others.

The Shizuoka District Court, in a decision dated March 24, said that “the claimant shall be granted 217,362,500,000 yen”, a court spokesman told AFP.

The same court ruled in September in a retrial that Mr Hakamada was not guilty and that police had tampered with evidence.

Mr Hakamada had suffered “inhumane interrogations meant to force a statement (confession)” that he later withdrew, the court said at the time.

The final amount is a record for compensation of this kind, local media said.

But Mr Hakamada’s legal team has said the money falls short of the pain he suffered.

Decades of detention – with the threat of execution constantly looming over him – took a major toll on Mr Hakamada’s mental health, his lawyers have said, describing him as “living in a world of fantasy”.

Mr Hakamada was the fifth death row inmate granted a retrial in Japan’s post-war history. All four previous cases also resulted in exonerations. AFP

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