Japanese court orders $1.4M in compensation to former death row inmate acquitted after nearly 50 years

A Japanese court has ruled that nearly $1.4M in compensation should be provided to a man acquitted in a murder case from nearly 60 years ago, public broadcaster NHK World Japan reported on Monday.

According to his legal team of Hakamada Iwao, once the world's longest-serving death row inmate, the amount of compensation is the largest of its kind in Japan.

The district court decided on Monday to instruct full payment of the amount to Hakamada.

Presiding Judge Kunii Koshi noted that out of more than 47 years, Hakamada had spent about 33 years under detention for a capital punishment sentence, emphasizing the extreme mental and physical suffering he had endured.

In February, his legal team announced that he sued the government for defamation after a prosecutor general called his exoneration “unacceptable.”

Hakamata, a onetime professional boxer, was acquitted last October of a 1966 quadruple murder in Shizuoka on Japan's eastern coast. The court ruled that the evidence had been “fabricated,” according to the Kyodo News Agency.

After the ruling, Prosecutor General Naomi Unemoto had said that the court's decision had “many problems in its reasoning.”

Hakamata's legal team argued that the prosecutor general's remarks imply he was guilty and therefore amounted to defamation.

A Japanese court convicted Hakamata and sentenced him to death in 1980.

The 88-year-old had already spent 50 years in prison by the time of his release in 2014.