Abolish Death Penalty India: Will the Gavit sisters, serial killers of children, be the first women to be hanged?

Tuesday, December 18, 2018

Will the Gavit sisters, serial killers of children, be the first women to be hanged?

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Updated: Jul 9, 2015, 08:10 AM IST

In 2001, the Kolhapur sessions court awarded the death penalty to the Gavit sisters – Seema Gavit and Renuka Shinde – for abducting and killing a dozen-odd children aged between one and four years. In the next 14 years, their appeals against the sentence were turned down by all subsequent authorities including the Bombay High Court and the Supreme Court. In April 2014 came the final blow for the sisters, when their mercy petition was rejected by the President of India.

Despite all of this, the sisters are still hopeful that they will escape the sentence. To stretch the legal discourse further, the duo in August 2014 filed a fresh petition before the Bombay High Court citing "delay in execution" as the latest reason for getting off death row. Since then there is a stay on their execution and the case, as expected, is moving at a snail's pace. With its last hearing held in April 2015, the case will now come up in October 2015.

(L to R) Renuka Shinde, Seema Gavit, Anjanabai, Kiran Shinde

The sisters are not alone. In the past three years, President Pranab Mukherjee has rejected 24 mercy pleas (till May 2015) of which only two convicts- Mohd Ajmal Kasab and Afzal Guru- have been hanged till date. The remaining convicts have managed to procure a stay on their hanging by moving fresh petitions before the respective High Courts, primarily on the grounds of prolonged procedural delays in execution. Maharashtra has 30 convicts on death row, including 1993 blast convict Yakub Memon and the three Shakti Mills rapists. All convicts facing death sentences in Maharashtra are moved to Yerwada in Pune or the Nagpur jail, because these are the only two prisons in the state that have gallows.

In January 2014, a three-judge panel headed by Chief Justice of India Palanisamy Sathasivam commuted sentences of 15 death row convicts, ruling that the "inordinate and inexplicable delay is a ground for commuting death penalty to life sentence". The Gavit sisters, too, have sought relief on the grounds of "delay" on the state government's part in executing them. But the state government has blamed the delays on the procedural lapses done by the jail superintendent as well as on the fire in Mantralaya. The government, in its affidavit filed before the Bombay High Court, said it could not furnish complete documents before the President at the earliest due to the fire, and had to procure relevant documents from the jail superintendent.

Sources in the home department also claim that the sisters, too, have deliberately delayed the proceedings under legal guidance. "They knew the delay will go in their favour. So, initially, one of the sisters sat on the consent to file mercy petition for over a year," said a senior officer. While awarding the death sentence to the sisters in 2001, Judge GL Yedke in Kolhapur had described the nine kids' murders as 'the most heinous', and observed that the two sisters seemed to have enjoyed killing the children.

What is the case against the Gavit sisters?

Renuka and Seema, along with their mother Anjanabai Gavit, used to kidnap children and push them into begging. They killed some of the children after they stopped being productive. The sisters are currently lodged at the Yerwada jail in Pune. Anjanabai passed away during the trial, and the sisters' father Kiran Shinde turned approver and was acquitted.

Source: https://www.dnaindia.com/mumbai/report-will-the-gavit-sisters-serial-killers-of-children-be-the-first-women-to-be-hanged-2102974 (Accessed 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

Will the Gavit sisters, serial killers of children, be the first women to be hanged?

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