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| Execution chamber at Tokyo Detention Center |
Revelations that inmates on Japan's death row were wrongfully convicted have sparked national debate and calls for reform of the death penalty.
While many countries in the region are abolishing the death penalty, Japan is sentencing more people than ever to hang, with 12 killed in the last 2 years.
But now former inmates who were put on death row after being wrongly convicted have started a reform movement, demanding legal representation for suspects, an end to detention without charge, and full video-taping of interrogations.
The public is backing them, with a campaign of demonstrations. But the country's government still insists it needs the death penalty.
Iwao Hakamada spent decades waiting to be executed for a crime he did not commit.
Mr Hakamada was wrongfully convicted of brutally murdering a family of 4 in 1968.
The police tortured him for 23 days to secure a confession, and at his trial the prosecution fabricated evidence.
"The police will do anything to get a confession," his sister Hideko said.
"Iwao had to sign off on what the police wrote - it's usual for the police to do this."
In 2007 one of the judges who sentenced Mr Hakamada to death publicly admitted the court got it wrong.
It took 7 years for Mr Hakamada to be released, after 46 years on death row.
His body may be free but his mind is not, as he has been diagnosed with institutional psychosis.
"I think it's natural to go crazy if you confined in a small space for more than 40 years, but you think they could have treated him more humanely," said Hideko, who devoted her life to getting her brother released.
Now, Iwao Hakamada paces up and down for 12 hours a day in a small apartment in central Japan.
'Make the suspect confess no matter what'
Japan has 125 death row inmates and it is emerging that, like Iwao Hakamada, some of them may be innocent.
Hiroshi Ichikawa was a prosecutor for 13 years and describes the system as fatally flawed.
As a prosecutor, he said he fabricated confessions and threatened 1 suspect with death.
"I was told 'make the suspect confess no matter what'," he said.
"It's an order telling you to make up a confession."
In the Japanese justice system, it is the confession and not the trial that virtually guarantees a guilty verdict.
The prosecution has an astonishing 99 % success rate, but Mr Ichikawa said he wanted that to change.
"It's nonsense to force a confession - I want the culture to change so they can accept acquittal," he said.
The alarming problem in cases of wrongful conviction is that the culprits could still be at large.
Toshikazu Sugaya was accused of being a paedophile and a serial killer of 3 young girls in 1991.
He was convicted of murdering 1, but after 19 years of jail, DNA tests revealed he was innocent.
Mr Sugaya says the real killer has a pattern - he kills girls between 4 and 8 years of age, in a 20-kilometre radius, and strikes about twice a decade.
And he claims the police are not investigating the case properly.
"I want them to investigate no matter what, I want them to hurry up and capture the real criminal before it's too late," he said.
Source: ABC news, January 23, 2015
