An 88-year-old man who is the world’s longest-serving death row inmate has been acquitted by a Japanese court, after it found that evidence used against him was fabricated.
Iwao Hakamada, who was on death row for almost half a century, was found guilty in 1968 of killing his boss, the man’s wife and their two teenage children.
He was recently granted a retrial amid suspicions that investigators may have planted evidence that led to his conviction for quadruple murder.
I’ve seen it reported that if you count plea bargains as convictions, which is much closer to how Japan calculates conviction rate, that the US conviction rate is essentially the same as the Japanese one.