Abolish Death Penalty India: Are we carving out separate jurisdiction for death row prisoners, SC asks

Monday, August 12, 2013

Are we carving out separate jurisdiction for death row prisoners, SC asks

Dhananjay Mahapatra, TNN Aug 9, 2013, 02.56AM IST

NEW DELHI: In a midnight order, the Supreme Court stopped Jabalpur jail authorities hours before they were to take Maganlal to the gallows on Thursday to execute the capital punishment given to him for hacking to death his five daughters, the eldest of whom was just six years, in Madhya Pradesh's Sehore district.

NGO 'People's Union for Democratic Rights' through senior advocate Colin Gonsalves swung into action late on Wednesday evening after the TOI website reported Maganlal's imminent execution in Jabalpur central jail and moved Chief Justice of India P Sathasivam, who held court at his residence close to midnight and ordered the authorities to put the scheduled execution on hold till Thursday.
On Thursday, sitting with Justice Ranjana Desai, Justice Sathasivam extended the stay on Maganlal's execution till further orders after Gonsalves doubted whether authorities had intimated the convict's family about the President's July 22 decision to reject his mercy plea.

Though the apex court has always acted in favour of right to life, a recent spate of petitions filed at the eleventh hour seeking stay of execution after rejection of mercy petitions by the President forced the bench of Justices Sathasivam and Desai to wonder aloud, "Are we creating a separate post-mercy rejection jurisdiction?"

There was a reason for the CJI to express his nuanced thoughts, because death warrants are issued against a condemned prisoner only after he goes through all tiers of judicial remedy - appeal in the high court, then in Supreme Court and following it up with review and curative petitions - to challenge the death sentence imposed on him by the trial court which awards capital sentence after finding the heinous crime fitting into the SC-devised 'rarest of rare' category.

In a similar late evening sitting on April 6 at the residence of Justice Sathasivam, he along with Justice MY Eqbal had stayed the execution of eight persons whose mercy pleas had been rejected. There too, PUDR was the public interest petitioner for the death row prisoners.

During the April 6 hearing, the bench of Justices Sathasivam and Eqbal had said it was entertaining the petition to ascertain whether proper communication had been sent to the relatives of these condemned prisoners whose mercy pleas had been rejected.

"It should not happen as it happened in the Jammu and Kashmir case (Afzal Guru's hanging). The intimation of the execution reached the relatives of the person (Afzal) after his hanging. That is bad. The relatives lost an opportunity to meet the condemned prisoner for one last time before his execution," the bench had said.

Gonsalves picked up the thread from the April 6 hearing and on Thursday argued before the bench of Justices Sathasivam and Desai that "no communication appears to have been sent to the family of Maganlal after the rejection of his mercy plea". The court allowed PUDR's lawyers - Rishabha Sancheti, Yug Mohit Chaudhry and Puja Sharma - to meet the family of the condemned prisoner and ascertain facts.

A trial court had on February 3, 2011, found Maganlal guilty of beheading his daughters Jamuna (1), Phool Kanwar (2), Aarti (4), Savita (5) and Leela (6) with an axe following a dispute over property with his two wives on June 11, 2010. The high court upheld the trial court decision seven months later and the Supreme Court dismissed his appeal on January 9 last year.

Source: http://articles.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/2013-08-09/india/41236594_1_mercy-petitions-mercy-plea-execution [accessed 12th August 2013]

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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

Monday, August 12, 2013

Are we carving out separate jurisdiction for death row prisoners, SC asks

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