Japan’s Longest-serving Death Row Inmate Gets $1.4m For 40-yr Wrongful Imprisonment

A Japanese man who was wrongfully convicted of murder and is recognised as the world’s longest-serving death row inmate has been awarded $1.4 million in compensation after over 40 years in prison, an official announced on Tuesday.

Iwao Hakamada, a former boxer, now 89, was exonerated last year of a 1966 quadruple murder after a tireless campaign by his sister and others.

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

This payout amounts to approximately $83 for each day of the over four decades that Iwao Hakamada spent in detention, most of which he spent on death row.

Right now, any day could be his last.

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

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 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 took a major toll on Hakamada’s mental health, his lawyers have said, describing him as “living in a world of fantasy”.

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