TOKYO — The physical evidence that implicated former pro boxer Iwao Hakamada in the stabbing deaths of a family of four on a summer night in 1966 was hardly conclusive.
The clothes prosecutors said he had worn during the killing did not fit him.
The murder weapon Hakamada allegedly used was, according to his lawyers, too small to make the wounds. And, they said, the door police claimed Hakamada used to enter and leave the victims' house was locked.
But prosecutors had the most important piece of evidence they needed, enough for the three judges of the Shizuoka District Court to find Hakamada guilty and sentence him to death.
Hakamada's confession.
It did not matter that Hakamada almost immediately retracted his admission and then testified during his trial that he had been beaten and threatened during extended interrogations over 22 days in a police detention cell, with no lawyer present. His signed admission of guilt has kept him in prison ever since, through failed appeals, still awaiting an execution that could come at any time.
Now his conviction is again under scrutiny, after the only surviving judge of the three-man panel that found him guilty -- by consensus -- broke four decades of silence to say he had always believed that Hakamada's confession was coerced. The case is seen by analysts here as a stark illustration of the Japanese legal system's addiction to acquiring convictions by confession.
"I knew right away that something was wrong with his confession," said the former judge, Norimichi Kumamoto, after he finally went public with his belief that he had participated in sentencing an innocent man to die.
Kumamoto, 70, quit the bench six months after the 1968 trial, and says he has carried "hurt in his heart" over his role in sending Hakamada to death row.
"I have always regretted that I couldn't persuade the chief judge" to acquit, he says. "He was older than me, and I thought that because he had experienced the war when freedoms were taken away or oppressed, that he would understand what had happened to Hakamada.
"But judges in Japan tended to be influenced by the media and social pressures, and the media were being very aggressive, describing [the accused] as an evil figure," Kumamoto recalls. "And Japanese tend to believe that the prosecutors' office, as an arm of the government, wouldn't do anything intentionally wrong."
Japanese courts deliberate in secret and verdicts are issued under all three names. (Japan does not have a jury system but plans to introduce a hybrid form of judges and juries in 2009.) Kumamoto kept his doubts about the boxer's conviction to himself, maintaining silence even as Hakamada's confession was cited as the reason for turning down his appeals and a bid for retrial.
When the ex-judge finally went public in March at a news conference in Tokyo, much of the subsequent media coverage attacked him for flouting a law prohibiting judges from disclosing deliberations.
Some, however, did welcome Kumamoto's blistering indictment of the system's reliance on confessions to maintain a conviction rate that exceeds 99% in criminal trials. Unlike American law, which gives suspects the right to have a lawyer present during questioning, Japan allows police to interrogate people without a lawyer for as many as 23 days before pressing charges or releasing them. They can then be rearrested, beginning another 23-day session.
'Substitute prisons'
The suspects are kept in small holding cells known as daiyo kangoku, or "substitute prisons," a setting that critics say allows police to coerce confessions to crimes they did not commit. The Japan Federation of Bar Assns. recently joined human rights groups in contending that holding suspects in such cramped conditions, with little or no contact with the outside world, "is a breeding ground of confession coercion and false accusations."
"This type of interrogation causes heavy mental suffering to suspects and can be considered torture," the lawyers group said.
Some judges have shown an increased willingness to question the methods used to acquire confessions. In February, a judge in western Japan reprimanded police and prosecutors for their handling of a case in which 12 defendants were eventually found not guilty of using beer and cash to buy votes in a local election.
Six of the suspects had confessed, but the judge ruled that they probably did so "to please the investigators, as they desperately wanted to be released."
Police had arrested, released and rearrested some of the suspects -- one defendant was held for a total of 395 days -- and some said they had been told that unless they confessed, their children would be fired from their jobs. The bullying was so bad that one defendant tried to drown himself, but was rescued.
In two other high-profile cases this year, murder and rape convictions were overturned that had been based solely on confessions extracted under intense pressure.
