Japan | He poisoned all the employees of a bank, took a miserable loot and spent 39 years awaiting execution
He presented himself as a medical epidemiologist showing the corresponding credential. Hirasawa explained that he had been sent by the US occupation authorities and that he had orders to treat bank staff against a sudden outbreak of dysentery, an intestinal inflammation that can be fatal without proper care. He gave the people present a pill and a few drops of a liquid that he carried in his briefcase. There were sixteen employees at the time and he asked that they prepare as many cups of tea to digest the medicine against dysentery. Naturally, he had to make the preparations for each patient.
The sixteen bank employees obediently lined up. “Please,” Sadamichi would say politely as he handed each employee a cup of tea. And they all drank the concoction that the doctor gave them. Those present drank the liquid, which was a solution of potassium cyanide When everyone was incapacitated and dying, the thief took all the money he could find in the customer service boxes, which amounted to only 160,000 yen (approximately $1,392 at the time). Ten of the victims died at the scene. (one was the son of an employee) and two others were taken to the hospital although the doctors could do little for them and eventually they also died.
The fall of Hirasawa
He was caught almost seven months later thanks to a business card left at the bank that belonged to Shigeru Matsui, Ministry of Health and Welfare, Department of Disease Prevention. Matsui had exchanged cards with many people. Hirasawa was unable to show the one Matsui had given him because, according to the police, it was the one he had left at the bank to pass himself off as Matsui.
Also, two survivors recognized him like the fake epidemiologist doctor who, for more information, had a scar under his chin. Hirasawa confessed, although he would say later that he did it under torture and that he was never in that bank. The man accused of committing the most original robbery in history, by massive poisoning, claimed his innocence until the end.
The court sentenced the defendant to hang, but the appeals were endless. His lawyers claimed that the sentence violated the Japanese constitution that protected citizens from self-destruction and that hanging was equivalent to self-strangulation. The argument was rejected. But they insisted. They sought to annul the confession, alleging that Hirasawa suffered from Korsakoff syndrome, a neurological disease that caused temporary amnesia. In addition, they questioned the identifications of the victims. They requested nineteen times that a new trial be held because the evidence was dubious.
Japan’s Supreme Court upheld the death penalty in 1955. However, none of the Justice Ministers, who were supposed to approve the executions, agreed to order his death. Hirasawa remained in prison for the next 33 years waiting to be taken to the gallows. He is believed to have been the longest serving man on death row.
In the penitentiary, he spent his time painting, an art he was successfully dabbling in in his homeland, Hokkaido, before his arrest. He even was a leading figure in tempera painting in Japan. He had gained prestige by exhibiting his works although after his theft his recognition in the world of painting disappeared. Moreover, in prison he wrote his autobiography.
In 1985, his lawyers tried to obtain his release, alleging that the sentence had expired, since the Japanese criminal code automatically commutes death sentences after thirty years of incarceration. However, the Supreme Court rejected the argument, pointing out that the sentence begins when the minister signs the sentence, something that never happened in the Hirasawa case, and that the rule was only applicable to convicted escapees.
Sadamichi Hirasawa, the man who since his arrest waited thirty-nine years to be hanged, died of pneumonia in a prison hospital on May 10, 1987, at the age of 95.
Seventy years after the amazing poisoning robbery, more than twenty Hirasawa paintings were exhibited at Gallery Ten in the Taito district of Tokyo. They are a small part of the thousands of works that Hirasawa created in prison, from the 1950s to the 1980s, with painting supplies provided by his family so that he could continue his career.
Source: tn.com.ar, Ricardo Canaletti, July 22, 2022
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"One is absolutely sickened, not by the crimes that the wicked have committed,
but by the punishments that the good have inflicted." -- Oscar Wilde
but by the punishments that the good have inflicted." -- Oscar Wilde