Noose or Pneumonia?

One day in 1948, a well-dressed, middle-aged man walked into a branch of Tokyo's Teikoku Bank wearing the armband of a municipal official. Claiming that he was a city health inspector, the man ordered the bank manager to summon all his employees so that he could give them a dose of antidysentery medicine. The employees gulped the potion, then collapsed in agony. From the open vaults, the medicine man grabbed about $185 in cash and disappeared into the street. Behind him, twelve people lay dead of cyanide poisoning.

Then began the hunt. From witnesses, artists drew a composite picture of the robber. Eight months after the robbery, police finally nabbed a prime suspect: a 57-year-old professional painter named Sadamichi Hirasawa. Hirasawa first admitted his guilt, then retracted the confession. He was tried, convicted, and sentenced to hang.

Two Out of 40. Last week, eight years after his last appeal was denied, Hirasawa, now 72, was still in jail under a death sentence. Japanese artists, writers and intellectuals have rallied to his support, and lawyers have protested against the severity of the sentence. "It seems to me," says one former Tokyo magistrate, "that the evidence was pretty flimsy."

The judge might have a point. Hirasawa insisted that the repudiated confession was extracted from him by torture in a brutal nonstop interrogation; later, the painter's two sons-in-law claimed that he was playing cards with them at the time of the robbery. Only two of the 40 eyewitnesses of the crime positively identified Hirasawa as the robber--and both were increasingly unsure as the trial wore on. The only clue pointing to Hirasawa was the calling card of the supposed health inspector, which the robber had left behind in the bank; handwriting experts determined that the writing on the back of the card was Hirasawa's. The painter never denied that he once had the card, but claimed that it had been stolen from him when his wallet was pickpocketed shortly before the robbery.

Painting in the Death House. Three Japanese appellate courts have upheld the original verdict, but the rapid turnover of Justice Ministers in ten Cabinet reshuffles since 1955 has helped keep Hirasawa alive. "If their hearts were in it, they could have read the record and signed the death warrant long ago," says one former Japanese judge. "But they were afraid, and I would be, too."

Hirasawa has applied for a new trial, but his application has no legal staying force on the order of execution. To focus attention on his case, Hirasawa's supporters arranged for an exhibition of 50 of the 480 tempera paintings that he has turned out in his 15 years in the death house. Hirasawa's backers have also circulated copies of the original composite newspaper drawing of the robber in hopes of turning up new suspects.

Last November state officials moved the painter from Tokyo prison to remote, unheated Miyagi Detention House in northern Japan--where all Japanese executions are carried out. "He was moved up there to die, but not by hanging," says one of his supporters. "The government hopes he'll die up there faster of natural causes, because Miyagi is cold and unhealthy. That way, they can keep his blood off their hands officially."

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