Abolish Death Penalty India: Madhya Pradesh: The Indian state with most death row cases

Wednesday, May 29, 2019

Madhya Pradesh: The Indian state with most death row cases

Critics say the death penalty often targets marginalised groups and warn of an unfair justice system.

by Omkar Khandekar, 12 Mar 2019

Madhya Pradesh, India - Last July, 34-year-old rickshaw driver Rajkumar Pol was accused of sexually abusing a four-year-old girl he used to take to and from school in his home town of Katni, in the central Indian state of Madhya Pradesh. When confronted by his employer, "he didn't look worried at all", said Pol's wife, Sulochana Kol, who believed her husband. She currently lives and works at a dairy farm with her in-laws. "He said he didn't do it … How could he do it when we have a young daughter ourselves?" State police soon arrested Pol. He couldn't afford a lawyer, so was appointed legal aid two days before the trial began on July 23.

The Katni trial court scheduled all-day, back-to-back hearings for three days. BM Singh Rathore, who represented Pol, complained that he was hardly given time to prepare, which limited his ability to cross-examine witnesses. "But the court said, 'you must go on,'," said Rathore. Pol, who maintained his innocence, was found guilty of raping the girl and was sentenced to death.

Advocate BM Singh Rathore does not believe his client got a fair chance [Omkar Khakendar/Al Jazeera]

In the absence of eyewitnesses, the verdict cited injuries around the child's private parts and testimony of her aunt, whom she had confided in. In 2018, 22 criminal cases in Madhya Pradesh, including Pol's, resulted in the death penalty - the highest across India that year. Twenty-one defendants were accused of sexually assaulting minors. Many of these trials were completed quickly - the defendants were convicted in days, at most weeks.Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi has praised the speed of sentencing as evidence of his efforts to ensure women's safety, "Rapes used to occur earlier as well," Modi said in a speech in January. "But today death penalties are ... within three days, seven days, 11 days and one month."

By the end of 2018, 426 prisoners were on death row. Executions are rarely carried out in India and only three have been recorded since 2008. But critics are worried over the rising use of the death penalty. "If you look at the statistical data, most of those on the death row are extremely poor, with very little or no education and belong to India's most marginalised groups," said Ankita Sarkar, associate litigator at Project 39A, a New Delhi-based research group. "The quality of legal representation that prisoners of death row receive is very often abysmal. These extremely short trials make for a terrible quality of justice especially in a system where fabrication of evidence and suppression of exculpatory evidence is rampant. "India's stand to retain the death penalty when the world is moving to abolish it thus ends up perpetuating a lot of prejudices and biases," she added. "States like Madhya Pradesh, in this context, starts to look like the Texas of India."

Al Jazeera recently interviewed legal experts and prosecution and defence lawyers involved in cases in Ujjain, Katni, Datia and Gwalior, all of which were fast-tracked in the trial courts. According to several of these individuals, the eagerness to dispense justice was a result of media clamour, legal reforms and a systemic push for the maximum punishment - often at the cost of due process.

Awarded points for swift justice

In January 2018, the gang rape of an eight-year-old girl in Kathua, in the state of Jammu and Kashmir, renewed focus on sex crimes in India. In April, the government of Madhya Pradesh passed an order - later codified into lawacross India - to make the sexual abuse of minors punishable by death. In May, the Supreme Court instructed trial courts to wrap up hearings within two months. Around the same time, Rajendra Kumar, Madhya Pradesh public prosecutor, introducedan online performance assessment system for lawyers representing the state in trial courts.

Each month, prosecutors were rewarded for the number of witnesses they examined and the number of convictions they secured. A death penalty verdict would get them 1,000 points, while life imprisonment earned 500 points. The best performers were recognised by the chief minister every month and regular high achievers stood a chance at being promoted. Acquittals meant losing points. Pushpendra Garg, district prosecution officer (DPO) in Datia, said the points system motivated his team. Garg was the lead prosecutor in a case that saw a 24-year-old man accused of sexually assaulting a six-year-old sentenced to life in prison last May, following a three-day trial. "Our conviction rate has increased to 60 percent compared to 40 percent the previous year. We're even appealing against acquittals in higher courts more," he told Al Jazeera.

More appeals mean more points. The push to secure the death penalty came from Kumar, the Directorate of Prosecution director, said Abdul Naseem, DPO in the city of Gwalior. He recalled an exchange he had with Kumar after a 26-year-old from Gwalior was arrested last June for the alleged rape and murder of a six-year-old. "Will the death sentence happen?" Kumar asked Naseem. "It's likely. We're trying," Naseem replied. "It should," Kumar said, according to Naseem. "Try harder."

The trial at Gwalior resulted in a death sentence, in less than three weeks. The High Court upheld the verdict despite the fact police had, said the prosecutor, planted an eyewitness to strengthen their case. According to defence lawyer Ravindra Singh Gurjar, nearly 17 lawyers from the state legal aid pool had refused to represent his client. "I too didn't want to but then I thought, how can I determine the guilt of a person without a trial?" As the trial began, he noticed that the prosecution used the media to stoke public anger. "Every day, the developments in the trial were reported in newspapers with the photograph of the accused and that of a noose. It was a closed-door trial and I wasn't speaking to the media. The information could only be given by the state prosecutors," he told Al Jazeera.

"I've often seen people framed by the police as accused. The motivation can be personal or there can be political pressure".

RAKESH SHARMA, CRIMINAL LAWYER

In Madhya Pradesh, nearly 2,500 rapes against minors were recorded in 2016. India has a poor record of convicting those accused of sexually abusing children - around 28 percent were convicted in 2016. Legal experts say the rising use of the death penalty, especially in cases that are fast-tracked, is worrying. "I've often seen people framed by the police as accused," said Rakesh Sharma, a criminal lawyer from Gwalior with 46 years of experience. "The motivation can be personal or there can be political pressure. In crimes involving a death sentence, it is the responsibility of a court to appoint an experienced, competent lawyer from the legal aid cell. They often don't."

According to the Supreme Court judgement in the case of Bachan Singh vs the State of Punjab in 1980, the death penalty is meant to be applied in the "rarest of rare" cases. But in recent years, the court has observed that it was being imposed "arbitrarily and freakishly", and that "principled sentencing" had become "judge-centric". In a 2008 study, Amnesty International called for a moratorium on the death penalty, citing the risks it poses to marginalised communities. A few years ago, New Delhi-based research group Project 39A examined death penalties handed out between 2000 and 2015 and found that less than five percent were upheld in the Supreme Court and almost 30 percent of death row prisoners were eventually acquitted.

Supreme Court judge Madan B Lokur claimed in 2016 that death row prisoners often failed to get quality representation, saying: "Legal aid in India is nothing but a joke." Kumar, the director-general of prosecution in Madhya Pradesh, however, said the speed of sentencing was a sign of efficiency. "You might say that [conviction in] five days is fast but we had given all possible evidences," he told Al Jazeera. "The high court has already confirmed [death sentences in] seven cases. Three to four cases were commuted to life imprisonment. But it never said the trials conducted were faulty." However, according to the Indian Criminal Procedure Code, the presiding judge is required to look into the circumstances of the accused and their life history, beyond the details of the crime, before imposing a death penalty. In most of the cases in Madhya Pradesh in 2018, death sentences were handed down on the same day as the verdict with little consideration to the accused person's social or criminal background.

Amit Shukla, assistant director general of prosecution in the state, added: "But the public has to have faith in system," he said. "If there's crime, there has to be punishment ... The government has made a law of death penalty. If we are following it, how's that wrong? If the person is innocent, he is relieved in the higher courts. Life goes on." Last October, the Jabalpur High Court in Madhya Pradesh commuted the death sentence of Rajkumar Pol, the rickshaw driver, to 22 years in prison. His crime was "vicious, condemnable and reprehensible … [but] nothing is available on record to suggest that he cannot be useful for the society." Six months on, his wife Sulochana visits him in prison every few weeks. "Even today he says he's innocent," she said. "We're thinking of moving to the Supreme Court. Maybe we'll get justice then."

Source: https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/madhya-pradesh-indian-state-death-row-inmates-190311214738671.html (accessed on 29 May 2019)

No comments:

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, May 29, 2019

Madhya Pradesh: The Indian state with most death row cases

No comments:

Post a Comment

Followers