Abolish Death Penalty India: Lashkar-e-Taiba

Showing posts with label Lashkar-e-Taiba. Show all posts

Sunday, December 23, 2018

Family of Kashmiri on Death Row Hopes for Relief (West Bengal)

Amin Masoodi

Srinagar, India

2017-02-06

Relatives of an alleged militant from Indian Kashmir said Monday they would appeal a death sentence and verdict handed to him last month by a court in West Bengal state.

Muzaffar Ahmad Rather – a 27-year-old from Kulgam district in south Kashmir – was convicted on Jan. 21 along with Pakistani nationals Mohammad Abdullah and Mohammed Yunus on charges related to waging war against India as alleged members of militant group Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT). The three were arrested in 2007 while trying to enter India from Bangladesh. The accused had received weapons training in Pakistan and planned to carry out terror attacks in Indian-administered Kashmir, police said.

But Rather’s family refuted police claims, saying authorities had falsely implicated him. “The verdict has shocked us. We are in the process of arranging funds so we can appeal the verdict in the High Court. We are hoping the High Court will not only overturn the verdict but also order his release,” Rather’s brother Mohammad Shafi, a daily wage laborer, told BenarNews.

“Even the police concede that they found no arms or ammunition on him. So how can they claim he was planning terror strikes?” he said. Rather went missing in 2002, his father Abdul Majid, also a laborer, said, adding they found out about his 2007 arrest through the media. Last month, Rather’s family saw him for the first time since he disappeared 14 years ago, when they visited him in prison. His relatives said they didn’t know what led to his disappearence when he was around 15 years old. “For nearly 10 years he has been locked up in prison and now they want to hang him. This isn’t right. I don’t believe that my son is a terrorist,” Majid told BenarNews.

Muzaffar Ahmad Rather is seen in an undated photograph taken before he went missing in 2002.

Appropriate punishment?

Rather’s defense counsel said their appeal against the verdict, which evoked protests across Kashmir, would likely come up for hearing later this month. “I argued desperately before the judge that the prosecution had failed to prove their charges against Rather and he should be released. But I was shocked that the court still handed him capital punishment,” Sabroata Basu, Rather’s lawyer, told BenarNews by phone from Kolkata. “The prosecution admitted in court that they did not find any incriminating material from the client and that charges of waging war were levelled on the basis of suspicion. I am quite confident the High Court will overturn the verdict and release him unconditionally,” Basu said.

The three accused were booked under Indian Penal Code Sections 120B (criminal conspiracy), 121 (waging, or attempting to wage war) and 122 (collecting arms with intention of waging war against the government of India), according to Nishad Pervej, West Bengal police’s deputy inspector general. “They are members of Lashkar-e-Taiba and were planning attacks on army camps in Jammu and Kashmir,” Pervej told a news conference. The Himalayan region of Kashmir, claimed in its entirety by both India and Pakistan, has been in the midst of a separatist insurgency that has claimed over 70,000 lives since the late 1980s.

Militants killed

Over the weekend, two suspected militants were killed in a firefight that broke out when government forces intercepted a vehicle the suspects were riding in, police said. “We intercepted their vehicle near Sopore on the main highway. They lobbed grenades at the forces and were killed in retaliatory fire,” Superintendent of Police Imtiyaz Hussain told Agence France-Presse. Two police officers, including member of a special anti-militancy group, were injured in Saturday’s incident, Hussain said.

Following a shutdown call by separatists in response to the verdict in Rather’s case, several thousand anti-India protesters took to the streets to accuse the Indian government of falsely implicating Kashmiri youths in criminal cases. “The verdict is against the internationally accepted norms of justice,” senior separatist leader Mirwaiz Umar Farooq told BenarNews. “It is unfortunate that the Indian judiciary has once against demonstrated miscarriage of justice. We reiterate our demand of the unconditional release of Muzaffar Ahmad Rather and all political prisoners languishing in Indian prisons,” Farooq said.

Source: https://www.benarnews.org/english/news/bengali/death-row-02062017123733.html (Accessed 23 December 2018)

Friday, May 2, 2014

India Red Fort: Court stays attacker's death penalty

28 April 2014 Last updated at 08:13 GMT

India's Supreme Court has put on hold the death sentence of Mohammad Arif, a Pakistani man convicted of attacking Delhi's Red Fort in December 2000.

The judges accepted his lawyer's argument that there had been a long delay in deciding his case.

Arif, also known as Ashfaq Arif, was a Lashkar-e-Taiba militant who was convicted in 2005. The Supreme Court confirmed his sentence in 2011. Three people died in the attack on the 17th Century fort, an Indian landmark. Arif's is the latest in a series of high-profile cases in which the Supreme Court has commuted death sentences because those facing execution have spent so long on death row.

In February, the court commuted the death sentences of three men convicted of plotting the 1991 assassination of former prime minister Rajiv Gandhi. And in January, the court had commuted the sentences of 15 death row prisoners to life in jail on the grounds of delay. On Monday, the Supreme Court ordered that a larger "constitution" bench be set up to decide Arif's case.

His lawyer had argued in the court that hanging Arif would be a violation of the constitution since he had already spent more than 13 years in jail. Arif was arrested along with his wife, Rehmana Yousuf Farooqui, four days after the Red Fort attack 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 lengths.

In September 2007, the high court upheld his conviction, but ordered the release of the others for lack of evidence. The Supreme Court confirmed his death penalty in 2011.

India rarely carries out executions, which are often delayed indefinitely or commuted by the president.

Source: http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-27184340 [accessed on 2nd May 2014]

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