The world’s longest-serving death row prisoner, once counting down his last days, is now making headlines for receiving compensation for his prolonged suffering behind bars.
Wrongly convicted of murder, Iwao Hakamada, a Japanese man who was the world’s longest-serving death row inmate, has been awarded $1.4 million in compensation.
Iwao Hakamata is a former professional boxer, and he was sentenced to death for a quadruple murder. Hakamata spent over four decades on death row, but he maintained his innocence, alleging that police had fabricated evidence against him.
He was found guilty in 1968 of killing his boss, his boss’s wife, and their two children but was acquitted last year after a retrial.
His conviction was overturned after a DNA test revealed that the bloodstained clothing used to convict him had been planted long after the murders.
On Monday, May 25, 2025, a district court in Shizuoka, a city west of Tokyo on Japan’s main island, ordered the government to pay Iwao Hakamada 217 million yen ($1.4 million).
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The payout represents 12,500 yen ($85) for each day of the more than four decades that Iwao Hakamada spent in detention, most of it on death row, when each day could have been his last.
But Hakamada’s legal team has said the money falls short of the pain he suffered between his 1966 arrest and his release in 2014, when he was granted a retrial.
Lawyer Hideyo Ogawa told a press conference that “I think the fact that he will receive it… compensates him a little bit for all the hardship.”
He added, “But in light of the hardship and suffering of the past 47 or 48 years, and given his current situation, I think it shows that the state has made mistakes that cannot be atoned for with 200 million yen.”
The former boxer, now 89 years old, was exonerated last year of the quadruple murder after a tireless campaign by his sister and others.
This case is a heartbreaking example of how justice delayed can have irreversible consequences.
