Abolish Death Penalty India: Police custody killings that brought Kerala public on the streets

Tuesday, December 25, 2018

Police custody killings that brought Kerala public on the streets

This is a relevant post, as in one of the most recent custodial deaths, two constables were awarded death sentence. There were several cases of custodial death in Kerala, where the relatives have spent an entire lifetime to get justice. It is very interesting that according to the police, most of these victims 'committed suicide' in prison. Why is that these people only choose a police lock up to commit suicide? (Reena Mary George)

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Written by Vishnu Varma |Kochi |Updated: July 25, 2018 9:06:26 pm

From Rajan to Udayakumar, here are some prominent cases of suspected custody killings in Kerala which have brought people on the streets rooting for justice.

From left, P Rajan (above) and his father TV Eachara Warrier (below), Udayakumar (above) and his mother Prabhavati (below) and Sreejith (above) and his wife Akhila (below)

After a 13 years, 27-year-old Udayakumar’s aged mother Prabhavati received justice this week when a CBI special court in Thiruvananthapuram pronounced five police officers guilty of involvement in the torture and death of her son in custody. While two of the officers have been awarded the capital punishment for murder, three others have been handed over jail sentences for abetment to crime and destruction of evidence. A sixth officer passed away during trial.

Udayakumar’s chilling murder in September 2005 after his brutal torture in custody, during which a heavy iron pipe was deliberately rolled down his thighs by the cops, brought thousands of people in Kerala on the streets demanding swift punishment for the perpetrators. It also caused a lot of embarrassment for the then-UDF government led by Oommen Chandy. The killing of Udayakumar, taken into custody on false charges of theft from a public park, produced a lot of consternation among the civil society about the police’s use of third-degree torture methods to extricate confessions. However, it was not the first time the police had employed such methods in custody and there’s evidence that such methods continue to be used even today.

Here are some prominent cases of suspected custody killings in Kerala which have brought people on the streets rooting for justice:

Rajan case during the Emergency

P. Rajan (Rajan’s remains have not been found till today - 2018)

P Rajan was a final year student of engineering in Kozhikode in March 1976 when he was allegedly whisked off by the police on charges of being a Naxal at a time when the Emergency was in effect in the country. His father, Prof TV Eachara Warrier, fought a long battle after his son went missing. After the Emergency was lifted, Warrier filed a habeas corpus petition to which the court responded by asking the then-government of K Karunakaran to file a response. The government and police authorities subsequently told the court that though Rajan was never officially taken into custody or produced before a magistrate, he infact died in unlawful police custody. The chief minister was forced to resign over massive public furore. Till this day, Rajan’s remains have not been found.

T. V. Eachara Warrier, Rajan's Father

Detention of Gopi in 1988

Gopi, a 24-year-old resident of Cherthala in Alappuzha district, was summoned to the local police station in October 1988 to question him about a robbery. Two days later, he was found dead. The police contended that he had committed suicide, but the tube-light injury to his stomach led his father to believe that his son was tortured and murdered by the police. For more than a decade, Gopi’s father Thankappan preserved his son’s body in formalin in his courtyard refusing to cremate his body until the police launched a fair probe. Gopi’s body was finally cremated in 1999. In 2008, a First Class Judicial Magistrate Court in Cherthala awarded one-year rigorous imprisonment to two officers for Gopi’s ‘illegal detention’, three years after Thankappan’s death.

Sampath murder case

On March 23, 2010, Sheela, wife of a prominent businessman in Puthur in Palakkad district, was murdered by three men at her home. Within a week of the murder, Sampath was arrested by the police and booked as first accused in Sheela’s murder but before he could be produced before the magistrate, he was found dead. The family of Sampath alleged that he was tortured and killed by the police under pressure from Sheela’s relatives. The case was later handed over to the CBI which arrested four officers in connection with the case in 2011. Several officials were suspended in the wake of Sampath’s death.

Sampath

Sreejeev’s murder in 2014

On May 19, 2014, Sreejeev, a resident of Kulathur near Thiruvananthapuram, was asked to appear before the Parassala police in connection with a break-in at a mobile phone shop. But two days later, he died after reportedly consuming pesticide crystals. The police theory was that he committed suicide but an inquiry report by K Narayana Kurup, a former HC judge and then chairman of the State Police Complaint Authority (SPCA), suggested that it could be a case of custody killing. The case was largely ignored until Sreejeev’s younger brother, Sreejith undertook a long sit-in in front of the state secretariat demanding justice. It was after Sreejith protested for 775 days that the CBI agreed to register an FIR in the case and begin an impartial probe. Sreejith’s long agitation received thunderous support on social media and on the streets of Kerala.

Sreejith’s death in Varapuzha

Sreejith, a 28-year-old tile worker, was picked up by the police from his home in Varapuzha in Ernakulam district in connection with a mob attack on a neighbouring house on April 6 this year. However, three days later, Sreejith died in a private hospital as a result of injuries sustained during alleged custodial torture. His family claimed that he was mercilessly beaten by the officers at the Varapuzha station and not even given a glass of water to drink. It was also later revealed that Sreejith’s arrest was a case of mistaken identity as the police were looking to arrest someone by the same name. The special crime branch of the Kerala Police is probing the case and has arrested several officers, including sub-inspector Deepak, who reportedly led the torture.

Sreejith

Source: https://indianexpress.com/article/india/the-sensational-police-custody-killings-that-brought-kerala-public-on-the-streets-udayakumar5276084/ (Accessed 25 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 25, 2018

Police custody killings that brought Kerala public on the streets

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