Abolish Death Penalty India: How the President decides matters of life and death

Tuesday, December 18, 2018

How the President decides matters of life and death

Written by Maneesh Chhibber |Updated: July 29, 2015 6:14:13 pm

maneesh.chhibber@expressindia.com

If Yakub Memon is hanged on July 30, he will be the third death row convict to be executed following the rejection of their clemency pleas by President Pranab Mukherjee. Since he became President in 2012, Mukherjee has turned down mercy pleas in at least 24 cases. Under Article 72 of the Constitution, the President can grant pardon, and suspend, remit or commute a sentence of death. However, the President does not exercise this power on this own — he has to act on the advice of the Council of Ministers. This too has been made clear by the Constitution.

In October last year, Yakub applied for presidential pardon after which a report from the state government was sought by the MHA. (PTI)

Under the existing rules of procedure governing mercy petitions, the view of the Union Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA), conveyed to the President in writing, is taken as the view of the Cabinet, and the President decides a mercy petition accordingly. Once a convict has been finally awarded the death sentence by the Supreme Court, anybody, including a foreign national, can send a mercy petition with regard to that person to the President’s Office or the MHA. A mercy plea can also be sent to the Governor of the state concerned, who then forwards it to the MHA for further action.

The convict can file a mercy plea from prison through officials, his lawyer or family. These days, mercy petitions can also be emailed to the MHA or President’s Secretariat. A few years ago, the Union Ministry of Law told the MHA that the President’s power to grant pardons, reprieves, respites or remissions of punishment under Article 72 was “absolute and cannot be fettered by any statutory provisions” under the Code of Criminal Procedure or prison rules. The then Law Secretary, T K Vishwanathan, also said that while commuting the death sentence, the President could direct that the convict would remain in prison for the whole of his natural life, and not be released after remission of the term. Vishwanathan clarified that life imprisonment meant “imprisonment for the whole of the remaining period of the convicted person’s natural life, and not 14 years in prison”.

Different Presidents have dealt with mercy petitions differently. Since there is no fixed timeframe for disposing of a mercy petition, both the MHA and President have sometimes sat on cases for years. Thus, at the end of his five-year term, APJ Abdul Kalam left behind over two dozen mercy pleas, having decided only two — rejecting the plea of rape-cum-murder convict Dhananjoy Chatterjee (2004), and commuting the death sentence of Kheraj Ram into life imprisonment (2006). Kalam’s predecessor, K R Narayanan, was tardier, and failed to decide a single mercy petition during his 1997-2002 term.

MHA data show that Presidents, with the exceptions of Narayanan and Pratibha Patil, have dealt with mercy petitions largely without mercy. According to information released by the government under the RTI Act, of the 77 mercy pleas decided by Presidents between 1991 and 2010, 69 were rejected. Only 8 — about 10% — of those who sought mercy were spared the gallows. R Venkataraman (1987-1992) rejected 44 mercy pleas, the most by any President. During her 2007-2012 term, Patil, the country’s first woman President, accepted the mercy pleas of 30 death row convicts — pardoning, among others, Piara Singh, Sarabjit Singh, Gurdev Singh and Satnam Singh, who killed 17 members of a family at a wedding; Govindasamy, who murdered five relatives in their sleep; and Dharmender Singh and Narendra Yadav, who killed an entire family of five, including a 15-year-old girl, whom Yadav had tried to rape, and her 10-year-old brother, whom they burnt alive.

Several Presidents have allowed their personal convictions — views against the death penalty or religious beliefs — to come in the way of their taking swift action on pending mercy petitions. Central governments have been accused of being guided by political considerations in making recommendations on mercy pleas to the President. The MHA has sometimes jumped the queue in sending mercy petitions to the President — the most recent case being that of 26/11 terrorist Ajmal Kasab, who was hanged in November 2012. The Ministry has on occasion also changed its recommendation — from rejecting a mercy petition to favouring its acceptance. On the issue of delay in deciding mercy pleas, the Supreme Court in a landmark judgment last year held that the death sentence of a condemned prisoner can be commuted to life imprisonment on the ground of delay on the part of the government in deciding the mercy plea.

Source: https://indianexpress.com/article/india/india-others/how-the-president-decides-matters-of-life-and-death/ (Accessed on 18 December 2018)

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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

Tuesday, December 18, 2018

How the President decides matters of life and death

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