Police fabricated key evidence that led to the conviction of Iwao Hakamada in 1968, but capital punishment still has popular support
By any reasonable legal measure, Iwao Hakamada should not have lived to see his conviction for murder overturned.
The former boxer, who spent almost half a century on death row after being convicted of killing a family of four in the late 1960s, was acquitted last week in one of the most closely watched miscarriages of justice in postwar Japan.
