Death row prisoners in torment as legal system grinds on

When his body is not groaning under the weight of its 83 years, and the sun is shining over his native Kyushu in southern Japan, Sakae Menda can forget the ordeal he suffered.

But most days, there is no blotting out that the Japanese state stole 34 years of his life, or that he thought every one of those more than 12,000 days would be his last. 'Waiting to die is a kind of torture worse than death itself.'

Menda is the first man freed from Japan's death row, which has come in for withering criticism in a report from Amnesty International. Inmates have been driven to near-insanity while awaiting execution, the group says, and at least five of Japan's 102 condemned prisoners are mentally ill.

Death penalty opponents say Japan is bucking a worldwide trend towards abolition. Although it incarcerates just one-third the number of its citizens than Britain, Japan's conviction rate of over 99 per cent means that the condemned certainly include innocent men like Menda, campaigners say.

'There is little doubt that there are more Menda-san's inside our jails,' says Yoshikuni Noguchi, a prison guard turned lawyer.

Inmates are kept in solitary confinement and forced to wait an average of more than seven years - and sometimes decades - in toilet-sized cells while the legal system grinds on. When the order eventually comes, the condemned have minutes to get their affairs in order before facing the noose.