The Archbishop of Tokyo has visited an 88-year-old Japanese former boxer and convert to Catholicism who was the world’s longest-serving death row inmate until his definitive acquittal in 2024, presenting him with a rosary blessed by Pope Francis. Source: Crux.
“I was accompanied by a Catholic lady from Tokyo who had been tirelessly working to support Mr Hakamada and his sister, Ms Hideko Hakamada, to prove his innocence, Archbishop Isao Kikuchi said.
“Hakamada is suffering negative psychological effects from long-term confinement and daily fear of execution for half a century.”
Mr Hakamada was sentenced with death in March 1968 after being convicted for a 1966 mass murder involving the slaying of his boss at a soybean paste maker and the man’s wife and two children.
From the beginning, Mr Hakamada proclaimed his innocence, claiming that an initial confession was coerced and that case was based on planted evidence.
After 48 years on death row, he was released from prison in 2014 because of new DNA evidence. A decade later, a retrial found police had fabricated evidence against him at the time of his initial conviction and acquitted Mr Hakamada, a ruling which became definitive when the prosecution declined to appeal.
Archbishop Kikuchi emphasised the stress Mr Hakamada had been under during his long incarceration. Under the Japanese system, the Minister of Justice could have signed an order of execution at any time, which would be communicated to the prisoner only on the morning of their death.
Today, Archbishop Kikuchi said, Mr Hakamada is a “wounded man.”
Mr Hakamada has become a symbol of a movement to oppose the death penalty in Japan. When Pope Francis, perhaps the world’s most visible and vocal death penalty opponent, visited Japan in 2019, Archbishop Kikuchi could not arrange a personal meeting for Mr Hakamada with the pontiff.
Archbishop Kikuchi said that last October, during the Synod of Bishops on Synodality, he informed Pope Francis of Mr Hakamada’s definitive acquittal and the Pope sent a note of congratulations and sympathy for his suffering, along with a personally blessed rosary, which was shipped to Japan by the Vatican’s Secretariat of State.
Archbishop Kikuchi delivered the items to Mr Hakamada on February 22.
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Papal rosary presented to Japanese boxer who was world’s longest death row inmate (By Nirmala Carvalho, Crux)
