Japan prosecutors may end retrial of former death row inmate

Sources familiar with the case told the Mainichi Shimbun that TOKYO public prosecutors are considering abandoning the moves to prove that former death row inmate Iwao Hakamada is guilty of murder when his trial begins in the Shizuoka District Court.

The proceedings would be shortened with major points of contention in the case removed, and it appears that Hakamada's acquittal could be accelerated.

Hakamada, 87, spent decades in prison over the murder of four members of a family in Shimizu, Shizuoka Prefecture in June 1966 - now part of the city of Shizuoka -- before being released and granted a retrial in 2014 by the Shizuoka District Court.

The case was sent back to the high court for further deliberation after being reversed by the Tokyo High Court, but the move was dismissed by Japan's Supreme Court. On March 13th this year, the high court decided to give Hakamada a retrial, acknowledging the credibility of an experiment by Hakamada's defense team, which involved putting bloodstained clothing in a large tank of miso to replicate items used as evidence in the case. The court considered this to be a new evidence that warrants a not guilty verdict. Public prosecutors considered whether or not the high court had misjudged the evidence, but they gave up on filing a special appeal with the Supreme Court by March 20th. The retrial will proceed accordingly, with new evidence admitted at the retrial hearing added to that, leading to Hakamada's earlier sentence.

According to sources close to the case, given the circumstances following the decision not to file a special appeal, they are apparently moving toward the view that the defense team's new evidence from the miso experiment would make it hard to prove Hakamada's guilt. How evidence is handled in the case is expected to be decided in three-way consultations with the Shizuoka District Court, the Shizuoka District Public Prosecutors Office and Hakamada's defense team.

Hakamada was arrested in 1966 and charged with murder of the managing director of a miso manufacturing company, where he worked, the director's wife, and their second daughter and eldest son. He maintained his innocence in his district court trial.

After that, five heavily bloodstained items of clothing were found in a miso tank at the company. The finalized ruling concluded that Hakamada was wearing these items at the time of the crime and discarded them in the tank. The high court referred to the possibility that the investigative authorities had fabricated the evidence in its decision on March 13 this year.