Abolish Death Penalty India: Delhi

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Sunday, December 23, 2018

Delhi: Gangster out on parole murders rival

TNN | Jul 8, 2017, 02.35 AM IST

NEW DELHI: A year after his death sentence was converted into life, a gangster released on parole returned to head his gang. Ajay Barwala eliminated one of his rivals outside the latter’s house in Najafgarh. He was arrested on Thursday night near Lajpat Nagar while he was on his way to settle scores with another rival. Barwala, an associate of gangster Anil Bhagte who was shot during an encounter last year, was arrested in 2009 by the Special Cell for possession of an illegal pistol.

One of his associates, Ajaybir, had personal rivalry with a gang in Bahadurgarh that had killed his brother. Out on bail, Barwala, with Ajaybir, went to Bahadurgarh and killed four men in a day. Both Barwala and Ajaybir were awarded death, which was later converted into life sentence by the Punjab and Haryana high court. He got a parole in 2015 for his brother’s marriage and absconded. In 2016, he murdered his earlier business partner, Devender Rathi, and tried to kill his brother-in-law Manjeet who survived. A team was formed after the police were informed that Barwala would come to Lajpat Nagar to meet an associate, said Romil Baaniya, DCP, southeast.

Barwala was wanted by the Delhi and Haryana police in several cases of murder, attempt to murder, extortion and kidnapping for ransom.

Source: https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/delhi/gangster-out-on-parole-murders-rival/articleshowprint/59497113.cms (Accessed 23 December 2018)

Two taxi drivers jailed for gang-rape, murder of woman (Delhi)

IANS/New Delhi

Filed on July 6, 2017 | Last updated on July 6, 2017 at 11.06 pm

The court also slapped a fine of Rs.50,000 on each convict and said that the fine amount of Rs1 lakh should be given to the victim's son.

A local court has held two taxi drivers guilty of gang-rape and murder of a woman in Delhi, and sentenced them to rigorous imprisonment for life. Their act was brutal and diabolic, creating a sense of insecurity among the women seeking to hire taxi at late hours, the court said. Additional Sessions Judge Sanjiv Jain sentenced Sikander alias Soni, 32, and Pradeep Singh, 34, to undergo rigorous imprisonment for life, which means imprisonment for a period not less than 20 years. "In the instant case, the convicts have not only committed the vile act of gang-rape of the deceased, who was a young woman aged 24 to 26 years, but also strangulated her to death," the court said in its July 1 order, which was released on Thursday.

The court noted that the two men, after committing the murder, tried to destroy evidence as they threw her semi-naked body near a Metro flyover in Nehru Place. "The act of the convicts was brutal and diabolic," the court said. "It is also true that the convicts are young men and do not have previous record of conviction and their parents are old and poor, but it is to be noted that they committed gang-rape and murder of a young woman having one-and-half years old son." "She (victim) had come to Defence Colony for shopping for her son. She hired their taxi for going to Rohini but they betrayed her trust, and created a sense of insecurity among women that it would be unsafe for them to hire a taxi at late hours," the court said.

The court after considering the facts and circumstances of the case and keeping in mind the interests of the society at large and the rights of the convicts observed: "I am of the view that this case does not fall under the category of rarest of the rare case warranting death sentence." The court also slapped a fine of Rs50,000 on each convict and said that the fine amount of Rs1 lakh should be given to the victim's son. Besides, the court also asked the Delhi Legal Service Authority to decide an appropriate compensation to be awarded to the legal heirs of the deceased. According to Delhi Police, on April 23, 2012, the woman from west Delhi visited Lajpat Nagar and Defence Colony for doing shopping for her son.

She hired the taxi of convicts. Finding her alone, instead of driving her to the destination, the convicts took her towards the Lodhi Institutional Area where they raped her. Then they throttled the woman to death and threw her body at Nehru Place so as to cause disappearance of evidence, the police alleged. On May 6, the court had convicted Soni and Singh under various charges related to gang-rape, murder and destruction of evidence.

Source: https://www.khaleejtimes.com/international/india/two-taxi-drivers-jailed-for-gang-rape-murder-of-woman (Accessed 23 December 2018)

Wednesday, August 31, 2011

India court confirms death penalty for Red Fort attack

India's Supreme Court has upheld the death sentence of Ashfaq Arif, a Pakistani man convicted of attacking an army barracks at Delhi's Red Fort.

Arif, a Lashkar-e-Taiba militant, was convicted for masterminding the attack.

He was given the death penalty by a local court. The Delhi high court confirmed the sentence in 2007.

Three people died in the December 2000 attack on the 17th Century fort, one of India's most famous landmarks. The raid strained relations with Pakistan.

Arif was arrested along with his wife, Rehmana Yousuf Farooqui, four days after the raid and found guilty of murder, criminal conspiracy and waging war against India.

The trial court convicted him and six others in October 2005.

He was sentenced to death, while the others received jail terms of varying length.

In September 2007, the high court upheld his conviction, but ordered the release of the others for lack of evidence.

The authorities said two militants entered the Red Fort - then being used as an army garrison - on the night of 22 December, 2000.

The gunmen attacked an army supply depot, killing two soldiers and a guard, before escaping.

The Pakistan based militant group Lashkar-e-Toiba, said it carried out the attack, which strained relations between India and Pakistan.

The Red Fort was the seat of Mughal rule until 1857, when India began to be governed by the British.

Indian troops left the fort in December 2003, after which it was handed over to the tourism ministry.

Source: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-south-asia-14471793
10 August 2011 Last updated at 08:30 GMT
News South Asia

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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