Abolish Death Penalty India: commutation of death sentence

Showing posts with label commutation of death sentence. Show all posts

Wednesday, May 29, 2019

SC commutes man's death penalty to life term in murder case (Madhya Pradesh)

24 FEBRUARY 2019 Last Updated at 7:27 PM | SOURCE: PTI

New Delhi, Feb 24 The Supreme Court has commuted to life term the death sentence awarded to a man for killing his wife and five children on the ground of "unexplained delay" of four years by the Madhya Pradesh government in forwarding the mercy petition of the convict to the Union Home Ministry. The apex court said there was a delay of almost five years in deciding the mercy petition as the state authorities kept sitting on it and did not forwarded it to the home ministry for four years. Observing that a mercy petition is the "last hope" of a person on death row, a bench headed by Justice N V Ramana said that convict Jagdish had filed a mercy petition before the jail authorities on October 13, 2009, but his plea was forwarded to the Ministry of Home Affairs on October 15, 2013.

"The mercy petition is the last hope of a person on death row. Every dawn will give rise to a new hope that his mercy petition may be accepted. By night fall this hope also dies," the bench, also comprising Justices Deepak Gupta and Indira Banerjee, said. "Keeping in view all the circumstances of the case, including the un-explained delay of four years in forwarding the mercy petition by the state of Madhya Pradesh leading to delay of almost five years in deciding the mercy petition and the fact that the petitioner has been incarcerated for almost 14 years, we are of view that regardless of the brutal nature of crime this is not a fit case where death sentence should be executed and we, accordingly commute the death sentence to that of life," the court said.

However, the bench directed that life imprisonment in the case would mean that convict will not be released from jail till his natural death. Jagdish had killed his wife and five children in August 2005 and the trial court had awarded him death penalty in April 2006. In June 2006, the Madhya Pradesh High Court had confirmed the death sentence awarded to him and later in September 2009 the apex court had dismissed his appeal. Thereafter, he had filed a mercy petition addressed to the President of India and the governor of Madhya Pradesh through the jail authorities on October 13, 2009.

His mercy petition was rejected by the President on July 16, 2014. Jagdish had then moved the apex court challenging the rejection of his mercy petition on the ground that there was a delay of almost five years in deciding the mercy petition and his death sentence should be commuted to life imprisonment. In its verdict, the apex court said that Madhya Pradesh government has given no explanation for the delay of over four years in forwarding the mercy petition to the home ministry.

"As far as the Government of India or the Secretariat of the President of India is concerned, there is no delay in dealing with the mercy petition and the same has been dealt with expeditiously," the bench said. "The delay in forwarding the (mercy) petition is totally un-explained and this court cannot countenance an un-explained delay of more than four years. We are dealing here with the case of a person who has been sentenced to death," it said. ABA MNL AQS AQS

Source: https://www.outlookindia.com/newsscroll/sc-commutes-mans-death-penalty-to-life-term-in-murder-case/1484971 (accessed on 29 May 2019)

SC commutes death sentence for ‘unexplained delay’ in forwarding mercy petition

By India New England News

February 21, 2019

New Delhi– The Supreme Court on Thursday commuted the death sentence of a man who murdered his wife and five children after rapping the Madhya Pradesh government for it “unexplained” delay of four years in forwarding his mercy petition to the Centre, leading to almost five years in deciding it.

Jagdish was convicted and sentenced to death by the trial court and the capital punishment was confirmed by the state High Court and upheld by the top court on September 18, 2009. Commuting the death sentence while noting the brutal nature of the crime in which “6 innocent lives were lost”, the bench of Justice N.V.Ramana, Justice Deepak Gupta and Justice Indira Banerjee directed, “We direct that life imprisonment in this case shall mean the entire remaining life of the petitioner and he shall not be released till his death.” The order came on Jagdish’s review petition challenging the President’s rejection of his mercy petition on July 16, 2014, arguing that there was a delay of almost five years in deciding it and that itself was a ground for commuting the death sentence.

He had also sought the review of the apex court’s September 18, 2009 judgment upholding his death sentence. In its decision, the court cited the “unexplained delay of four years in forwarding the mercy petition by the state of Madhya Pradesh leading to delay of almost five years in deciding the mercy petition and the fact that the petitioner has been incarcerated for almost 14 years …” Taking a dim view of the way the Madhya Pradesh government acted, the court said, “We are constrained to observe that not only was there a long, inordinate and unexplained delay on the part of the state of Madhya Pradesh but to make matters worse, the state of Madhya Pradesh has not even cared to file any counter-affidavit in the writ petition even though notice was issued four years back on November 18, 2014 and service was effected within a month of issuance of notice.”

Observing that the delay in forwarding the petition was “totally unexplained” and the top court “cannot countenance” it, Justice Gupta, speaking for the bench, observed, “We are dealing here with the case of a person who has been sentenced to death. The mercy petition is the last hope of a person on death row. Every dawn will give rise to a new hope that his mercy petition may be accepted. By nightfall this hope also dies.” This court, the judgment said, has repeatedly held that in cases where death sentence has to be executed, it should be done as early as possible and if mercy petitions are not forwarded for four years and no explanation is submitted, “we cannot but hold that the delay is inordinate and unexplained.”

Observing that the death sentence is the exception and has to be pronounced in rarest of rare cases, the court said that it was of the view that “regardless of the brutal nature”, this crime was not a fit case for a death sentence. (IANS)

Source: https://indianewengland.com/2019/02/sc-commutes-death-sentence-for-unexplained-delay-in-forwarding-mercy-petition/ (accessed on 29 May 2019)

Tuesday, December 25, 2018

Supreme Court commutes death penalty of Chhattisgarh man

By Express News Service |New Delhi |Published: November 29, 2018 5:27:43 am

The Sessions Judge, Durg, had sentenced Verma to death in June 2013, holding it as a rarest of rare case. The Chhattisgarh High Court confirmed the sentence on April 11, 2014.

THE SUPREME Court on Wednesday commuted the death penalty imposed on a Chhattisgarh man convicted of killing three people and attempting to kill a fourth, saying the question whether the accused was capable of reformation was not considered at the time of trial. “No evidence as to the uncommon nature of the offence or the improbability of reformation or rehabilitation of the appellant has been adduced… Whether the person is capable of reformation and rehabilitation should also be taken into consideration while imposing death penalty,” a bench of Justices Kurian Joseph, Deepak Gupta and Hemant Gupta ruled while commuting appellant Chhannu Lal Verma’s sentence to life imprisonment.

The Sessions Judge, Durg, had sentenced Verma to death in June 2013, holding it as a rarest of rare case. The Chhattisgarh High Court confirmed the sentence on April 11, 2014. The incident dates back to October 19, 2011 when Verma entered the house of Anandram Sahu and caused fatal injuries to him, Sahu’s wife Firanteen Bai and daughter-in-law Ratna Sahu. He then entered another house and attacked a woman. The apex court relied on a certificate it received from the jail superintendent, which said that Verma’s conduct in jail had been good. “Thus, there is a clear indication that despite having lost all hope, no frustration has set on the appellant. On the contrary, there was a conscious effort on his part to lead a good life for the remaining period. A convict is sent to jail with the hope and expectation that he would make amends and get reformed. That there is such a positive change on a death row convict, in our view, should also weigh with the Court while taking a decision as to whether the alternative option is unquestionably foreclosed,” the bench said.

Writing for the bench, Justice Joseph referred to the 1980 judgment of a Constitution bench in the Bachan Singh Vs State of Punjab case in which the court had by a 4-1 majority laid down that the death penalty could only be imposed in rarest of rare cases. Justice Joseph wrote, “As held by the Constitution Bench in Bachan Singh.it was the duty of the State to prove by evidence that the convict cannot be reformed or rehabilitated. That information not having been furnished by the State at the relevant time, the information now furnished by the State becomes all the more relevant. The standard set by the ‘rarest of rare’ test in Bachan Singh is a high standard. The conduct of the convict in prison cannot be lost sight of. The fact that the prisoner has displayed good behaviour in prison certainly goes on to show that he is not beyond reform.”

Source: https://indianexpress.com/article/india/supreme-court-commutes-death-penalty-of-chhattisgarh-man-5469909/ (Accessed 25 December 2018)

High Court commutes rapist’s death sentence to life (Madhya Pradesh)

Written by Milind Ghatwai |Bhopal |Published: November 2, 2018 4:57:50 am

Touheed Shoukat, accused of raping a three-year-old girl near Chhatarpur in April, was awarded the death penalty by the IV additional sessions judge, Chhatarpur, on August 6 after a speedy trial.

The Madhya Pradesh High Court on Thursday commuted the death sentence awarded to a 19-year-old man charged with raping a minor, observing that it is not appropriate to award the death penalty in every case. Touheed Shoukat, accused of raping a three-year-old girl near Chhatarpur in April, was awarded the death penalty by the IV additional sessions judge, Chhatarpur, on August 6 after a speedy trial. Shoukat’s father did not have money to engage a lawyer to defend his son. The court provided him an advocate under free legal aid, but the advocate could not even visit the scene of crime, more than 60 km from Chhatarpur, because he did not have money.

“To award death sentence, some factors like age of the culprit and manner of commission of offence and possibilities of reformation of the accused are necessary to be considered,” said the division bench of Justices S K Seth and Anjuly Palo, while deciding the criminal reference for the confirmation of death sentence.

Source: https://indianexpress.com/article/india/madhya-pradesh-high-court-commutes-rapists-death-sentence-to-life-5430360/ (Accessed 25 December 2018)

HC commutes death penalty of rape convict (Madhya Pradesh)

Written by Milind Ghatwai |Bhopal |Published: October 27, 2018 2:00:30 am

The Madhya Pradesh High Court on Friday commuted to rigorous imprisonment for 20 years the death sentence awarded to a rickshaw driver who was accused of penetrating a four-year-old girl with his finger after a five-day trial.

Rajkumar Kol, who drove the minor to school, was handed capital punishment on July 27 by a special (POCSO) court in Katni. The 33-year-old was arrested on July 7, three days after the incident, and the trial began on July 23. Between July 23 and July 2, 20 witnesses were examined while Rajkumar’s statement was recorded on July 26.

In his Independence Day speech, Prime Minister Narendra Modi had cited the five-day trial in Katni as a case that should be publicised so that people with demonic mentality get scared. A division bench of Chief Justice Hemant Gupta and Justice Vijay Kumar Shukla held that the act of the accused inserting a finger into the private part of the victim amounts to rape under Section 375 of IPC, but the manner in which the offence was committed was not barbaric and brutal.

Source: https://indianexpress.com/article/india/hc-commutes-death-penalty-of-rape-convict-5420586/ (Accessed 25 December 2018)

MP HC commutes rape convict's death sentence to life term (Madhya Pradesh)

11 OCTOBER 2018 Last Updated at 11:44 PM | SOURCE: PTI

Jabalpur (MP), Oct 11 The Madhya Pradesh High Court on Thursday commuted the death sentence of a man convicted of raping a minor girl to life term.

A division bench of Chief Justice Hemant Gupta and Justice V K Shukla held that the case against Bhaggi alias Bhagirath alias Naran (40) did not fall in the category of 'rarest of rare' to warrant capital punishment. On July 7, a trial court in Sagar district had awarded the death sentence to Bhaggi after finding him guilty of abduction and rape of a nine-year-old girl.

He was accused of luring the girl to a temple and raping her on May 21. The trial court had sentenced him as per the amended provisions of the Indian Penal Code and the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences Act in Madhya Pradesh, wherein capital punishment can be awarded in a rape case if the victim is under 12 years of age.

Source: https://www.outlookindia.com/newsscroll/mp-hc-commutes-rape-convicts-death-sentence-to-life-term/1401270 (Accessed 25 December 2018)

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