Death-row case sparks calls to reform 'primitive' legal system

Each dawn for the past 39 years, Iwao Hakamada has wondered whether it will mark his last day. Every morning, wardens walk along the corridor outside Tokyo Prison's death-row isolation cells. A couple of times a year, they stop, enter a cell, inform the inmate that he is to be hung within the next couple of hours and tell him to prepare his personal effects.

The strain on inmates is immense. It has been even harder on convicted multiple-murderer Hakamada, who has protested his innocence for decades. His supporters say there are indications that he is suffering from mental illness. But still they have been unable to win a retrial for a man who was a talented and record-breaking bantamweight boxer.

Their repeated pleas for a court to reconsider Hakamada's arrest and conviction for four murders in 1966 have fallen on deaf ears. But they have renewed hope now that Norimichi Kumamoto has come forward.

Mr Kumamoto, 70, was one of the panel of three judges that found Hakamada guilty. His not-guilty vote was outweighed by the two more senior judges, both of whom have since died, but Mr Kumamoto has never been able to put Hakamada out of his mind. And now he wants to help set him free.

'I felt instinctively that there was something wrong, mainly because it took the police 22 days to extract the confession from Hakamada,' said Mr Kumamoto. 'The two 'star' officers of the Shizuoka Prefectural Police took it in turns to interrogate him - on one day for more than 16 hours - all without his lawyer present. I asked myself what the rest of the investigators were doing. Did they have no other evidence?'

The police did have other evidence, although prosecutors would have been hard pressed to hang a credible case on it. The clothes they said Hakamada had worn on the night of June 30, 1966, to break into the home of a family of four in the town of Shimizu did not fit him, and the knife with which he allegedly killed them did not match wounds on the bodies.