Abolish Death Penalty India: Qasab deserves legal aid to draft mercy plea

Friday, October 5, 2012

Qasab deserves legal aid to draft mercy plea

Advocate Yug Chaudhry on why due process must be followed even in this rarest of rare cases Posted On Thursday, October 04, 2012 at 02:04:36 AM A week after Ajmal Qasab was sentenced to death, advocate Yug Chaudhry wrote to the Home Minister and the NHRC, pointing out that Qasab was entitled to legal aid in drafting his mercy petition. Dismayed at the news that the mercy petition, drafted without legal help, has been rejected, Chaudhry tells Jyoti Punwani why it is necessary to follow the spirit and letter of the law - even in Qasab’s case. Why are you so concerned with Qasab getting legal aid at this stage? Haven’t we given him a fair trial, despite his obvious guilt? Yes we have given him due process thus far, and that is why we must continue to do so. Qasab has a right to file mercy petitions before the governor and the President, but he lacks the wherewithal to so. He is illiterate, a stranger to our laws, and a foreigner abandoned by his countrymen. Since he is clearly ill-equipped to make a mercy petition which it is his right to make, he must be given the necessary assistance. He also has a right under our constitution to legal aid at every stage of the judicial and post-judicial proceedings. For rights to be meaningful, they must be accompanied by facilities that render those rights accessible. If we believe in our Constitution and the rule of law, we cannot make an exception in his case. Can a legally drafted mercy petition make any difference to Qasab’s fate? He cannot plead innocence or lack of a fair trial. Neither would a fair trial have made any difference to his fate, but would that have been a reason to deny him one? The question is not whether a mercy petition would make a difference, but whether he is entitled to make one and to receive the necessary assistance. The moment we allow ourselves, through sheer majoritarian sentiment, to decide outcomes without due process, we put all our liberties in jeopardy and negate the very essence of rights, which is to protect each of us from ad-hoc, majoritarian caprice. The scope of a mercy petition encompasses more than innocence and a fair trial, and few lay persons, let alone an illiterate person, would be competent to draft one unaided. Given that the death penalty exists in India, doesn’t Qasab deserve it? An illiterate boy of 13 sold by his family to the LeT, brainwashed into jihad, transformed into a killing machine and sent as a footsoldier to India are mitigating factors that entitle him to the lesser penalty. Qasab’s crime should be contexualised without minimising it, and then we should ask ourselves why are we clamouring for Qasab’s execution while content with life sentences for Babu Bajrangi and Maya Kodnani who perpetrated the Narodya Patya massacres. They killed more or less the same number of people in an equally gruesome manner. Maya Kodnani held public office, and turned on those she was charged to look after and protect. If she doesn’t deserve the death sentence, why does he? How else can Qasab be punished, given the enormity of his crime? Keep him in prison for the rest of his life. Treat him like a human being so that he becomes human again and realises the enormity of his crime. Allow for the possibility of repentance and reformation. Do you feel Qasab deserves mercy? I think all of us - the best and the worst - are in need of mercy, and it is only by showing mercy that, morally, we ourselves become entitled to receiving it. Bereft of mercy, our society would be impoverished and inhuman, for mercy is quintessentially a human quality, not found elsewhere in the natural world. In classical thought and in many faiths, mercy is the manifestation of divinity within us, of a god who is the ultimate bestower of mercy. As for “deserving”, give each man his deserts and who shall escape a whipping? Justice and mercy operate in mutually exclusive realms. It is only when justice demands that punishment be inflicted that mercy comes into play. Mercy tempers justice, makes it less exacting, more humane. Excluding a fellow human being from entitlement to mercy has nothing to recommend it except a very base blood lust that we encourage at our peril. If we have to become a more humane and compassionate society, and leave a better, less blood-thirsty world behind for our children, we have to curb our instinct for bloody retribution. Source: http://www.mumbaimirror.com/article/2/2012100420121004020503161a2c1a95e/Qasab-deserves-legal-aid-to-draft-mercy-plea.html [accessed on 4th October 2012]

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The Death Penalty Scenario in India

India is one of the 193 countries that retains death penalty. There has always been a few imminent judges who have pronounced compelling verdicts upholding the rights of prisoners on death row. There has been increasing debate in various platforms advocating abolition of death penalty or at least to rethink sentencing policies in India. The Indian government has however always been committed to the retention of the death penalty, irrespective of their political ideology. India has voted against a United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) draft resolution on the use of death penalty, saying it goes against the statutory law of the country where an execution is carried out in the "rarest of rare" cases. India retains the death penalty as punishment for a number of crimes including murder, kidnapping, terrorism, desertion, inducement to suicide of a minor or a mentally-retarded person and has more recently in 2013 come to include the offence of rape in certain circumstances. Most recently, there is an outrage over child rape and murder.

After observing an unofficial moratorium of 8 years in India, the Indian Government in November 2012 carried out the execution of Ajmal Kasab, convicted in the Mumbai attacks case, without public knowledge. This was followed by the secret execution of Afzal Guru, convicted in the Parliament attack case of 2001, in February 2013, under similar circumstances, without intimating his immediate family or affording a chance of judicial review. In both cases, the executions were carried out under covert operations conducted by the Government immediately upon rejection of their mercy petitions. Before these executions, the last execution to be carried out in India was that of Dhananjoy Chatterjee in 2004 who was convicted of rape and murder and which sentence was carried out after he had spent 13 years in solitary confinement. Following this, several mercy petitions of death row convicts have come to be rejected. The fear of execution of such convicts is imminent. Bolstered by the Government's unapologetic conduct and public outcry, especially in recent cases of rape and murder reported in the country, the courts are continuing to hand down death sentences at an alarming rate.

In the recent past, there have been a few empirical studies (mainly four) conducted with prisoners on death row. This has highlighted the situation of prisoners on death row.

(1) Most recently the India Exclusion Report 2017-18 found that fair trial rights and guarantees are reduced to a nullity and seeks to breach the citadel of the collective silence. It further said that Convicts on death row in India belong to groups marginalised along the axes of caste, religion, economic vulnerability and educational deprivation, and their fair trial rights, though a part of the Right to Life guaranteed by the Constitution, are invariably non-existent, a survey of 371 out of the 385 persons living under the death sentence and their families has revealed.

(2) Another study was The Death Penalty Research Project (2015) which was conceived with an aim to document the socio-economic profile of prisoners sentenced to death in India and map their experience within the criminal justice system.

There were two other academic studies that were done conducted by Dr. Reena Mary George –

(3)“Voices of prisoners surviving the death row in India” (2014) done through the University of Vienna under the guidance of Prof. Dr. Christoph Reinprecht (Sociology) and Prof. Dr. Manfred Nowak (Law and Ex-United Nations Rapporteur on Torture). George’s research highlights three salient features, namely: poverty, social exclusion and marginalisation are antecedent to death penalty; death penalty is a constructed account by the state machinery; and prisoners on death row situate dignity higher in the juxtaposition of death and dignity.

(4) Another one “Death Penalty – A Human Rights Perspective” (2009) done through the University of Mumbai under the guidance of Retired Justice Hosbet Suresh. This was a study in Maharashtra with the objectives to firstly study the impact of death penalty on the social, mental, and physical being of the inmate and secondly, to study the perception of opinion leaders on death penalty with reference to human rights. All the above reports are public documents.

According to the National Crime Records Bureau, Prison Statistics 2015, there are 101 prisoners sentenced to death. The actual figure of sentences originally awarded is much higher considering the death sentences of 49 convicts came to be commuted to life imprisonment in the said period. As of today, almost in 2019, the figures are unknown through government statistics, however, research centres claim this figure to be around 371 convicts. During the 1980s the Supreme Court sought to restrict the use of the death penalty by characterizing it as a punishment reserved only for the “rarest of the rare” cases. The doctrine has not had the desired effect. According to a former chief justice of the Delhi High Court, Rajindar Sachar: “after the rarest of rare doctrine was introduced in 1980, the Supreme Court confirmed death penalty in 40 per cent of cases in the period 1980-90 while it was 37.7 per cent between 1970 and 1980. For the high courts it rose from 59 per cent in 1970-80 to 65 per cent during 1980-90”. Over the past two decades the death penalty has been extended to include more crimes and been handed down with increasing frequency.

Most recently while commuting a sentence in Supreme Court (2018), Justice Joseph did not seek the reconsideration of the Bachan Singh judgment, but only sought to re-examine the purpose and practice of the death penalty, and whether as a punishment, it serves any goal at all. In other words, the death penalty can continue to remain constitutionally valid because of the Bachan Singh judgment, but its application in substantive cases coming before the court must be restricted to only those cases which meet the criteria laid down in that case.

While updating the blog and conducting my own empirical studies, I observed the heinous nature of the crimes that were committed and thought about the families, about their loss, about the victims who for no fault of their own died. If I lost my relative or a dear friend, would I still oppose death penalty and would I still advocate to abolish the death sentence? Having worked in the criminal justice system and also having the seen the other side, where often it is the marginalized, vulnerable and oppressed who are on death row makes me want to advocate for abolition of this punishment. Victims should definitely get justice for their loss, for their pain. No one should escape the rule of law. As long as humanity exists; crime will exist. Should we not re-consider our sentencing policies?

Reena Mary George

Abolish Death Penalty India

Friday, October 5, 2012

Qasab deserves legal aid to draft mercy plea

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