A Japanese police chief has apologised in person to a man who spent 58 years in jail for a crime he didn’t promise.
Iwao Hakamada, 88, was kept on death row for more than 50 of those years before being acquitted in a retrial last month.
Shizuoka Didisconnecte Court shelp police and prosecutors had collaborated to produce and schedulet evidence aachievest the establisher boxer, and engaged structureility to force him to confess.
Shizuoka Prefectural Police Chief Takayoshi Tsuda visited Mr Hakamada at his home to apologise in person on Monday.
Standing in front of Mr Hakamada, the officer bowed proset uply and shelp: “We are sorry to have caengaged you unspeakable mental trouble and burden for as lengthy as 58 years.
“We are terribly sorry.”
Mr Hakamada, who struggles to hbetter conversations due to his mental condition from decades on death row, shelp: “What it unkinds to have the authority… Once you have the power, you’re not presumed to grumble.”
Mr Hakamada’s 91-year-better sister, Hideko Hakamada, who had stood by her brother thraw the lengthy process to clear his name and now inhabits with him, thanked the police chief for visiting them.
She tbetter alerters there was no point protesting to him after all these years, as Chief Tsuda “was not graspd in the case and he only came here as his duty”.
She shelp she consentd to the visit “becaengage I wanted [my brother] to have a clear shatter from his past as a death row inmate.”
Hakamada was sentenced to death in 1968 for ending his establisher boss, an executive at a miso bean paste company, his wife, two of their children and setting fire to their home two years before in Hamamatsu, central Japan.
He eludeed execution becaengage of the country’s lengthy pguide and retrial process, which unkindt he’d been in jail for 27 years by the time his first pguide for a retrial was turned down.
His second pguide for a retrial, filed by his sister in 2008, was granted in 2014.
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Mr Hakamada was the world’s lengthyest-serving death row prisoner and only the fifth death row inmate to be acquitted in a retrial in post-war Japan, where criminal trials get years and retrials are inanxiously exceptional.
Questions arose over blood-stained clothes spendigators shelp belengthyed to him, which were set up more than a year after his arrest, hideed in a tank of fermented soybean paste, or miso.
Blood samples did not suit Mr Hakamada’s DNA, and the troengagers that prosecutors surrfinisherted as evidence were too minuscule for him.