Japan Pro Boxing Association’s committee members to call for ‘’Free Hakamada’’ movement submitted a written request to the Tokyo High Public Prosecutors Office on Oct. 3 and asked the office to issue its judgement of acquittal soon to former professional boxer Iwao Hakamada who was sentenced to death over a 1966 quadruple murder case in central Japan.

  Included among some 15 participants in front of the office were Hakamada’s sister Hideko Hakamada, World Boxing Association and World Boxing Council light flyweight champion Kenshiro Teraji of B.M.B. Boxing Gym and World Boxing Organization female super flyweight champion Mizuki Hiruta of Misako Boxing Gym.

  The participants called for the complete and early exoneration of the 87-year-old Hakamada by striking out their fists in the air by wearing white boxing bandages.

  By submitting the request, the committee asked the prosecution side to abstain from its claim to the effect that Hakamada would be guilty during the retrial which will start on Oct. 27.

  The retrial is expected to end next March, in which Hakamada would be acquitted completely.

Hakamada himself had been released from the Tokyo Detention House in March 2014 under a Shizuoka district court ruling. But he is still stigmatized as a death-row inmate.

According to the then police, Hakamada stabbed to death four family members at a soybean paste shop on June 30, 1966 in Shizuoka Prefecture’s Shimizu Ward in an attempt to steal money, and then set fire to the shop after pouring gasoline on the bodies.

The main focal point between the defense and prosecution was the color of the blood-soaked five items of clothing, believed to be those of Hakamada as they were found in a miso tank a little more than a year after the murder case.

When they were found, the redness of the bloodstain was seen. But the defense argued about the color, saying it is impossible for those clothes to maintain redness as long as more than a year in the tank. They bloodstain should turn black.

The defense said it had been fabricated by a third party shortly before the clothes were found, while the prosecution side maintained that redness can be retained based on its own experiments.