Death row inmate’s sister still fighting, even after release

Free at last: Iwao (far left) and Hideko Hakamada (right) leaving after a press conference in Tokyo. —AFP

FOR almost six ­decades Hideko Hakamada campaigned to get her little brother, the world’s ­longest-serving death row inmate, cleared. At 92 she refuses to relax, campaigning against capital punishment in Japan and beyond.

“Courts are run by people and they obviously make mistakes,” Hideko told a congress in Tokyo on the death penalty in East Asia where she was a keynote speaker.