page_title: Sadamichi Hirasawa
section_title: Doubt over guilty verdict
hierarchical_section_title: Sadamichi Hirasawa / Doubt over guilty verdict
caption_attribution_description: Teigin case
context_page_description: Sadamichi Hirasawa was a Japanese tempera painter. He was convicted of mass poisoning and sentenced to death, though he is believed to have been falsely charged. Due to strong suspicions that he was innocent, no justice minister ever signed his death warrant.
context_section_description: He was sentenced to death, but there was originally no conclusive evidence. In addition, although 40 employees saw the crimes, there were only two people who identified him as the criminal. Seichō Matsumoto presumed that the true culprit was a former member of Unit 731 in his books A story of the Teikoku Bank Incident in 1959 and The Black Fog of Japan in 1960. Matsumoto also suspected that "the money of unknown origin" came from selling pornographic drawings. Kei Kumai protested Hirasawa's conviction by his film The Long Death in 1964.
  Successive Ministers of Justice in Japan did not sign his death warrant, so the death sentence was never carried out. Even Isaji Tanaka, who on 13 October 1967 announced in front of the press that he had signed the death warrants of 23 prisoners in one go, did not sign Hirasawa's death warrant, stating that he doubted Hirasawa's guilt.
  The poison was regarded as the readily obtainable potassium cyanide in Hirasawa's trial. One of the reasons given to doubt Hirasawa's guilt is because the victims' symptoms were clearly different from potassium cyanide poisoning, which is rapid. Keio University's contemporary investigation claimed that the true poison may have been acetone cyanohydrin, a military poison deliberately designed to be slow-acting, which Hirasawa could not have obtained.
caption: Japanese police made the montage picture of the criminal, but his face was clearly not similar to Hirasawa.
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