Abolish Death Penalty India: 'Cyanide' killer of women sentenced to be hanged

Wednesday, March 4, 2015

'Cyanide' killer of women sentenced to be hanged

By V M Sathish Published Sunday, December 22, 2013 The culprit, formerly a physical education teacher in a school in southern India, used to kill victims with cyanide pills A serial killer in India, nicknamed ‘Cyanide Mohan’, who was convicted for murdering three young women with cyanide poison pills after luring them with marriage offers, has been sentenced to death by a court in India. Mohan was convicted on Saturday by the Fourth Additional District and Sessions Court in Mangalore judge B K Naik in the southern state of Karnataka in the Anita Baremar, Leelavathi and Sunanda rape and murder cases out of the 20 serial rape and murder cases registered against him. Judge Naik said Mohan’s case fell in the ‘rarest of rare’ category. The death sentence will be implemented only after getting confirmation from the High Court. The court concluded from the revelations of 49 witnesses that he had taken the lives of innocent women without any provocation. A primary school physical education teacher, Mohan is an accused in 17 other cyanide murders, mainly in Karnataka. 50-year-old Mohanan, who hailed from Kanyana village near Bantwal in Mangalore district, was arrested in 2009, from Deralakatta village near Mangalore from the house of his third wife Sridevi by police investigating the case of a missing 22-year-old woman named Anitha.

On questioning him, Karnataka State Police was shocked to learn that Mohan was involved in the murder of 20 other women. He had been luring young women into a relationship with him by offering to marry them without dowry or job. Most of the cyanide murders were committed in public toilets of bus depots, according to Indian media reports. The South Indian expatriate community in the Gulf is keenly discussing the court’s judgement in this case on social networking web sites. The killer’s modus operandi was to take the women to distant places, and after sex with them in lodges, would give them cyanide tablets under the pretext of being contraceptive pills. After the women died, he would abscond with their ornaments and money. Mohan used to book rooms in lodges in different aliases but used the same handwriting and address. Karnataka Police had earlier closed many of these cases as suicides resulting from failed love affairs. According to the police, Mohan was greedy for money, gold and women but his neighbours and close relatives were not initially willing to believe that he is a serial killer. Even his two wives were unaware of his series of killings till he was arrested, according to Indian media reports.

All the murders took place between 2003 and 2009, and most of the victims were women in the age group of 22 to 35 who could not afford to pay dowry or were unable to find suitable husbands. Four of his victims were from Kerala and five from Kodagu in neighbouring Karnataka state. Most of the victims had cash and gold ornaments with them, sometimes borrowed from neighbours and family friends. One of the victims even took a bank loan of Indian rupees 25,000 before eloping with Mohan. Mohan has confessed to killing 20 women, mostly from the lower socio-economic background. In 2009 alone, nine women were killed for the jewellery and the money they carried. Police caught hold of the physical education teacher, while investigating the case of Anitha who was missing from her village of Bantwal. Anitha was his 18th victim. He was traced from the mobile phone contact list of one of his victims. According to the information released by Karnataka Police, ten of the 21 murders happened in the Mysore bus stand, three at the Madikeri bus stand, two each at the Hassan bus stand and Banglore bus station, and one near the Kollur temple in Udupi district. Mohan himself appeared for his defence in court, after studying a number of legal books, according to media reports. He argued that the case had not been proved beyond all reasonable doubt. He had also begged for leniency as his family was poor, his two children were in high school and his mother was in good health. He had tried to kill himself when he was in police custody.

Mohan learned about cyanide from a goldsmith who told him he used the poisonous material to polish the precious metal. He obtained the deadly material by posing as a goldsmith. Mohan would approach single women in public places, pretending prior familiarity and would pursue them for a few weeks before proposing marriage without dowry. He would present himself as a government official and elope with the victim to a distant place and book a room in a lodge close to a temple in a different name. He used to select lodges near a temple on the pretext that they would be married in the temple the next day. Either or a day before the wedding, he would give the victims two cyanide pills, convincing the victims that they are contraceptive pills and would advise them to go inside the bus depot’s toilet to take the pills because after taking the pills they would vomit. Mohan had divorced his first wife but had two other wives living in separate houses. He started the killing spree after he was sacked in 2003 from government service. Karnataka Police recovered cyanide pills, forged identity and visiting cards in various names, fake government seals and rubber stamps, gold ornaments and mobile phones from his house. He maintained a list of women he tried to attract and was successful with about 20 per cent of the women he tried to lure, police said.

Source: http://www.emirates247.com/crime/region/cyanide-killer-of-women-sentenced-to-be-hanged-2013-12-22-1.532145 [last accessed on 04.03.2015]

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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, March 4, 2015

'Cyanide' killer of women sentenced to be hanged

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