Abolish Death Penalty India: Sentences show India gets tough on rapists

Wednesday, April 23, 2014

Sentences show India gets tough on rapists

By Udayan Namboodiri for Khabar South Asia in New Delhi April 15, 2014

A pair of court rulings in high-profile rape cases sends a strong message that Indians no longer tolerate sexual violence against women.

In a landmark decision, a court in Mumbai on April 4th sentenced three men to death for taking part in separate gang rapes of two women at an abandoned textile mill last year. That same day, a high court in Kerala handed prison sentences to two dozen men acquitted in 2005 of charges in a 1996 multiple rape case. That 16-year old victim was raped at least 41 times over a 40-day period.

"Times have become hard for rapists in India," Maharashtra State Women's Commission chairperson Sushiben Shah told Khabar South Asia. The Mumbai ruling marked the first case in which repeat offenders received a capital sentence under newly toughened Indian anti-rape laws. The legal changes followed outcry over the December 2012 case of a 23-year-old medical student who died after being gang-raped aboard a New Delhi bus. Four of the woman's six assailants received death sentences, a juvenile received jail time and prior to trial, a sixth alleged assailant was found dead of suspected suicide in his cell.

Now under the Indian Penal Code's revised section 376(e), repeat rapists can face capital punishment.

"There needs to be zero tolerance for such incidents,"Judge Shalini Phansalkar-Joshi said in handing down the sentences in Mumbai, according to AFP. "A loud and clear message needs to be sent to society." The judge sentenced Vijay Jadhav, Kasim Bengali (also known as Mohammad Qasim Shaikh) and Mohammed Salim Ansari to death for their roles in an August 22nd, 2013 gang-rape of a female photojournalist at the abandoned Shakti Mills, and a previous July 31st, 2013 gang-rape of a telephone operator at the same site. They are appealing their sentences.

Four men and a minor all took part in the photojournalist's attack. The fourth, Rehman, received a life sentence. The juvenile is being tried by a special court. Mohammed Ashwaq Sheikh, another man who took part only in the late July gang-rape, also received a life sentence, AFP reported. "This has certainly sent a positive signal even though it is an open question whether capital punishment is desirable in a civilised country," National Commission for Women chairperson Mamta Sharma told Khabar.

Slow justice for one

Though the victims of the Mumbai gang rapes got swift justice, such was not the case for the then-teen victim of the 1996 case which originated in Suryanelli in Kerala's Idukki District. On April 4th, a three-judge state High Court bench overturned the lower court's 9-year-old acquittal by sentencing main perpetrator Dharmarajan, to life in prison. The panel also sentenced two co-defendants to 10-year terms. The remaining 21 received terms of at least four years each.

"The miscarriage of justice in the Suryanelli case was a blot on the nation's image," Brinda Karat, a former Communist Party of India (Marxist) MP, told Khabar. "Now finally the hapless victims of rape can hope for justice."

Source: http://khabarsouthasia.com/en_GB/articles/apwi/articles/features/2014/04/15/feature-01 [accessed 24 April 2014]

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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

Wednesday, April 23, 2014

Sentences show India gets tough on rapists

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