HAMAMATSU, (Japan): The head of a public prosecutors’ office in Shizuoka Prefecture on Wednesday (Nov 27) apologised directly to Iwao Hakamada, who was recently acquitted in a retrial decades after he was convicted over the 1966 murder of four people.
“We are very sorry that your legal status had been unstable for a considerable period of time and you had spent your days in an unspeakable distress,” Hideo Yamada, head of the Shizuoka District Public Prosecutors Office, told the 88-year-old former death-row inmate at his home in the city of Hamamatsu.
