Former Japanese professional boxer Iwao Hakamada (L), who was sentenced to death for the murder of four members of a family in 1966 and released in 2014, and his sister Hideko (R) leave after a press conference in Tokyo on November 25, 2019. Kazuhiro Nogi, AFP  

TOKYO - A Japanese man wrongly convicted of murder who was the world's longest-serving death row inmate has been awarded $1.4 million (approximately 80.2 million pesos) in compensation, an official said Tuesday.

Japan court acquits longest-serving death row prisoner

The payout represents 12,500 yen ($83) 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.

The former boxer, now 89, was accused and found guilty of the murders of an executive, his wife and 2 children who were found stabbed to death in June 30, 1966.

He was granted a retrial and immediate release in March 2014 and then exonerated of the crime in 2024 when a court found there was reason to believe police had tampered with the evidence.

Hakamada initially denied having robbed and murdered the victims, but confessed following what he later described as a brutal police interrogation that included beatings.

Central to the trial was a set of blood-stained clothes found in a tank of miso -- fermented soybean paste -- a year after the 1966 murders, used as evidence to incriminate Hakamada.

The defense accused investigators of a set-up, as the red stains on the clothes were too bright, but prosecutors said their own experiments showed the color was credible.

The Shizuoka District Court, in a decision dated Monday, said that "the claimant shall be granted 217,362,500,000 yen", a court spokesman told AFP.

Hakamada had suffered "inhumane interrogations meant to force a statement (confession)" that he later withdrew, the court said at the time.

The final amount is a record for compensation of this kind, local media said.

But Hakamada's legal team has said the money falls short of the pain he suffered.

Decades of detention -- with the threat of execution constantly looming -- took a major toll on Hakamada's mental health, his lawyers have said, describing him as "living in a world of fantasy".

Hakamada was the fifth death row inmate granted a retrial in Japan's post-war history. All four previous cases also resulted in exonerations.

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