Japanese court compensates ex-death row inmate with record $1.4 million payout
Iwao Hakamada, 84, at home after Japan’s top court ordered a review of his case (Photo: Getty Images)
A Japanese court has awarded ¥217 million ($1.4 million) to Iwao Hakamada, 89, who was acquitted in 2023 after spending more than four decades on death row for a crime he did not commit, The New York Times reports.
On Monday, the Shizuoka District Court ordered the Japanese government to compensate Iwao Hakamada for the 47 years he spent in detention following a wrongful conviction for the murder of four people in 1966.
The payout - the largest of its kind in Japan - translates to roughly $83 for each day of his incarceration. Hakamada, a former professional featherweight boxer, maintained his innocence from the beginning, retracting a confession he said was forced through brutal police interrogation.
Over the years, his defense team argued that the police fabricated evidence and coerced a false confession. "The country committed a crime against him," said his lawyer, Hideyo Ogawa. "This compensation only partially reflects the suffering he endured."
Justice delayed, but not denied
Hakamada was sentenced to death in 1980, and only in 2014 did new DNA tests reveal that the blood on key evidence did not belong to him. He was released at that time, but the case continued. It wasn’t until 2020 that Japan’s Supreme Court finally ordered a new trial, which led to Hakamada’s full acquittal in 2023.
His story became one of the most striking examples of wrongful conviction in Japan - and echoes a similar case in the United States. In December 2023, Glynn Simmons was officially declared innocent after spending 48 years in prison for a murder he did not commit - the longest wrongful imprisonment in US history. Unlike Hakamada, however, the compensation amount in the US was significantly lower.
