No one would deny that thirty-four years is a very long time. And every one of those years must feel longer when you’re on death row, waiting for that fateful day when the guards will enter your cell with their heads bowed. Yet that’s exactly what Sakae Menda went through. He spent more than three decades on Japan’s death row for a crime he did not commit.
Menda was arrested in 1948 for the murder of a priest and his wife who lived nearby. The police held him for three weeks without access to a lawyer, and they tortured him into a confession. He was convicted in 1951, and spent those long thirty-four years in a solitary cell with virtually no human interaction, before finally being released.
Menda, now eighty-seven years old, currently works as an activist. In 2007 he delivered a speech against the death penalty to the World Congress. He has also lobbied the United Nations in the hope of abolishing capital punishment around the world. --
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Topic: Sakae Menda: Innocent Man Sentenced To Death (Read 780 times)