Photo/Illutration Iwao Hakamada’s sister, Hideko, flashes a smile after learning that the Tokyo High Court granted a retrial for brother on March 13. (Sayuri Ide)

The Tokyo High Court on March 13 decided to allow a retrial for an 87-year-old former boxer who spent decades on death row for four murders he insists he did not commit.

The decision followed the Supreme Court’s order in 2020 for the high court to nullify its earlier ruling against holding a retrial for Iwao Hakamada and to re-examine the case.

If prosecutors appeal the March 13 high court decision, the case would return to the Supreme Court.

But if they decided against it, a retrial will open at the Shizuoka District Court, which will most likely find him innocent.

Hakamada’s family members and supporters have demanded a swift retrial, citing his declining health and the mental illnesses he developed while on death row. He currently lives with his sister in Hamamatsu, Shizuoka Prefecture.

Hakamada was arrested on suspicion of murder two months after a 41-year-old executive of a miso manufacturing company and three of his family members were killed in what is now Shizuoka in June 1966.

They were stabbed and their house was set on fire. Investigators also found that 200,000 yen ($1,400) in cash was stolen from the home.

Hakamada worked for the miso company.

Although he reportedly confessed to the killings during questioning by law enforcement officials, he denied his involvement once his trial opened at the Shizuoka District Court.

In August 1967, when the trial was ongoing, an employee of the miso company discovered five articles of clothing, including a T-shirt and a pair of trousers with blood stains, from a miso tank.

Prosecutors contended the clothes were worn by Hakamada at the time of the attack.

The district court agreed that the clothing belonged to the defendant, and that he wore them during the assault because the blood type of the stains matched his.

The district court sentenced Hakamada to death in 1968. The Supreme Court finalized the sentence in 1980.

But the district court decided to reopen the case in 2014 after granting a request for a retrial from Hakamada’s defense team in 2008.

In the proceedings, the court recognized as credible a DNA analysis that found the blood stains left on the clothes were not from Hakamada.

The court also sided with the defense team’s claim that it is “unnatural” for the blood stains in the clothing to remain reddish despite being soaked in miso for more than a year.

Defense lawyers said that their re-enactment experiment showed the blood stains would have blackened under those conditions.

The court ordered a stay of execution and that Hakamada be released. Based on the results of the blood discoloration experiment, the court even mentioned the possibility that law enforcement officers may have fabricated and planted the evidence.

But in 2018, the Tokyo High Court overturned the lower court’s decision to hold a retrial.

It denied the credibility of the DNA examination, questioning the way it was conducted. It also dismissed as “inaccurate” the defense’s experiment on the discoloration of the blood stains.

Two years later, the Supreme Court ordered the high court to redeliberate the Hakamada case, pointing out that it has yet to fully examine the question of the blood’s discoloration.

But it supported the high court’s ruling that the result of the DNA test was not credible.

The central question at the high court was whether blood could retain a reddish color even after being immersed in miso for more than a year.

Prosecutors and the defense team presented expert evidence to back up their positions.

Prosecutors argued that the color of the blood can remain reddish, depending on the volume of miso and the concentration of oxygen.

Judges inspected the prosecution’s experiment that lasted a year and two months from 2021, the same duration that transpired in the Hakamada case, before reaching the decision to allow the retrial.

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