Abolish Death Penalty India: Chhattisgarh

Showing posts with label Chhattisgarh. Show all posts

Monday, December 24, 2018

SC Stays Execution Of Death Sentence - Rape And Murder Of 3-Year-Old Girl (Chhattisgarh)

BY: ASHOK K.M APRIL 6, 2018 11:51 AM

The gullibility and vulnerability of a 3-year-old girl, who could not have nurtured any idea about the maladroitly designed biological desires of this nature, accompanied the accused who extinguished her life spark, the high court had observed. The Supreme Court has stayed the execution of the death sentence of a man accused of rape and murder of a 3-year-old girl.

The Chhattisgarh High Court had dismissed the appeal filed by the accused who was found guilty by the trial court. It had also confirmed the death sentence awarded to him. In this case, after the girl went missing, the accused, Lochan Shrivas, himself claimed that he can trace the whereabouts of the girl within an within an hour by performing pooja and the parents of victim girl approached him and asked him to perform pooja and also provided him material required for performing pooja. After pooja, he informed them that the girl is packed in a gunny bag lying in the bushes near the pole at Amlibhauna. This made them suspect the accused and later the police registered the case. During interrogation, he spelt out details of the crime and later he was chargesheeted and convicted by the trial court.

While confirming the death sentence, the high court had observed: “The appellant’s conduct exhibits total disregard for human values and shows a totally depraved, brutal and scheming mind taking advantage of helplessness of a child, who had only seen three springs of life.” The division bench had also observed: “Life of a girl was taken away in a gruesome and barbaric manner which pricks not only the judicial conscience but also the conscience of the society. The crime in question was not committed under any mental stress or emotional disturbance and therefore it is difficult to comprehend that he would not commit such acts and would be reformed or rehabilitated.” The bench headed by the Chief Justice of India Dipak Misra, granting leave to appeal, also directed the Registry to call for the records.

Source: https://www.livelaw.in/sc-stays-execution-death-sentence-man-accused-rape-murder-3-year-old-girl-read-order/ (Accessed 24 December 2018)

Sunday, December 23, 2018

Delhi HC sets aside President’s order rejecting mercy plea of death-row convict (Chhattisgarh)

Jun 29, 2017 07:33 IST

Soibam Rocky Singh

New Delhi, Hindutan Times

This judgment is an embarrassment for the President’s office, which acts on the aid and advice of the Union home ministry in deciding mercy pleas.

The Delhi high court set aside on Wednesday the President’s order rejecting the mercy plea of a death-row convict and reduced his sentence to life term. The court order follows a petition filed by the advocate of convicted dacoit Sonu Sardar, who killed five members of a family, including two children, during a robbery in Chhattisgarh’s Cher village in 2004. A division bench of justices GS Sistani and Vinod Goel said the presidential order rejecting the convict’s appeal for clemency was vitiated. “The mercy petition was processed in an extremely cavalier and casual fashion by the state government at all stages, right up to placing the note for the governor,” the court said.

This judgment is an embarrassment for the President’s office, which acts on the aid and advice of the Union home ministry in deciding mercy pleas. The Supreme Court too has commuted death sentences, holding delay and not taking into account relevant factors in deciding mercy pleas as reasons for reducing the punishment. Dacoit Sardar was sentenced to death in 2008 by a trial court and the Chhattisgarh high court upheld the verdict. The Supreme Court too stood by the two lower courts in February 2012. His mercy petition was dismissed by the state government and the President in May 2014. In February 2015, the apex court rejected his review plea.

Sonu Sardar

The convict then moved the Delhi high court against the decision of the Chhattisgarh government and the President. In its order, the high court said: “The relevant considerations of the mitigating circumstances, recommendation of the jail superintendent and the young age of the petitioner were not placed before the governor depriving him of the opportunity to exercise his power in a fair and just manner.” The court noted that there were “numerous discrepancies and falsities” in the affidavits filed by the Chhattisgarh government. It further remarked that the “supervening circumstance of solitary confinement coupled with the non-placement of relevant considerations and considering of extraneous considerations has vitiated the decision of the governor and the President”.

Sardar was kept in solitary confinement for five years, which the court said violated his fundamental rights. “This court, being the sentinel of the Constitution, is bound to intervene and give relief to the petitioner,” it added. Also, the court made it clear that “life imprisonment means (till the) end of one’s life”.

Source: https://www.hindustantimes.com/india-news/delhi-hc-sets-aside-president-s-order-rejecting-mercy-plea-of-death-row-convict/story-vGWeRGerBjLBRC85YW4jAL.html (Accessed 23 December 2018).

Thursday, December 20, 2018

Chhattisgarh: Man gets capital punishment for rape, murder of 3-year-old

By PTI |Raigarh |Published: June 18, 2016 10:35:36 am

A fast-track court on Friday sentenced a 23-year-old man to death for sexually assaulting and murdering a three-year-old girl.

Terming the offence as "rarest of the rare", the judge said the convict is a threat not only to the society but to humanity. Additional District and Sessions Judge Yogesh Pareek convicted Lochan Srivas, a resident of Bajrang Para locality, and awarded him capital punishment, Deputy Director (Prosecution) Kripal Singh Gavaskar said. Terming the offence as “rarest of the rare”, the judge said the convict is a threat not only to the society but to humanity. On February 24, Srivas took the girl, who was playing in the locality, to his house and raped her, the prosecution said. The accused then strangled her, kept the child’s body in a sack and threw it in Sangitarai area, Gavaskar said.

Following the victim’s mother’s complaint, the accused was arrested on the charges of rape and murder and chargesheet was filed in court on April 26, he said. After hearing the arguments, the judge in his 58-page order convicted Srivas under sections 377 (unnatural sex), 30 (murder), 363 (punishment for kidnapping) of IPC, besides section 6 of Protection of Children from Sexual Offences (POCSO) Act, Gavaskar said. The judge imposed a fine of Rs 8,500 on him, and if he fails to pay the amount, he would have to undergo additional imprisonment of one-and-a-half years, Gavaskar said. The court also directed the state government to pay compensation of Rs 5 lakh to the kin of the deceased after the period allowed for appeal by the convict ends, he added.

Source: https://indianexpress.com/article/india/india-news-india/chhattisgarh-man-gets-capital-punishment-for-rape-murder-of-3-year-old-2860307/ (Accessed 20 December 2018)

Friday, February 6, 2015

DEATH CAN BE AWARDED INSPITE OF YOUNG AGE: CHHATTISGARH TO SC

Agencies | Jan 20, 2015, 08.29 PM IST

New Delhi: Death sentences can be awarded inspite of the young age of a convict and there are several judgements to buttress it, Chhattisgarh government told the Supreme Court on Tuesday. The submission was made before a three-judge bench, headed by Justice A R Dave, which is hearing the review plea of condemned convict Sonu Sardar whose mercy petition has been rejected by the President after the apex court had upheld the death penalty.

The counsels for Chhattisgarh, Atul Jha and Dharmendra Kumar Sinha, said there were a number of cases in which the apex court have confirmed death penalty of convicts who were of young age at the time of commission of an offence. Raising objection to the submission of Sardar's counsel that the conviction should be re-visited, he said the circumstantial evidence proved that Sonu had played a "vital role" in the crime.

He cited apex court judgements where death sentence was confirmed in cases hinging on circumstantial evidence and there were more than one accused involved in the offence. The bench, which is hearing the plea in an open court in view of an earlier verdict that review petitions in death penalty cases would not be decided in closed chambers, fixed the matter for further consideration on February 10 saying "We intend to reserve a full day for hearing. We don't want to put constraints on anybody."

Sardar, who was few months above the age of minority, was convicted and sentenced to death for killing five family members including two minors of a scrap dealer in Raipur on November 26, 2004 by the trial court on February 27, 2008. The Chhattisgarh High Court and the Supreme Court had confirmed it on March 8, 2010 and February 23, 2012, respectively. The Supreme Court had, thereafter, on June 19 stayed execution of his death sentence. The President had rejected his mercy plea on April 21 last year.

Source: http://www.ahmedabadmirror.com/news/india/Death-can-be-awarded-inspite-of-young-ageChhattisgarh-to-SC/articleshow/45956634.cms [last accessed 06.02.2015]

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