Former A P J Abdul Kalam favours abolition of death penalty

By Express News Service |New Delhi |Updated: July 10, 2015 3:27:35 am

Kalam said as President he felt pain in deciding mercy petitions of death row convicts since most of them had 'social and economic bias'.

Former president A P J Abdul Kalam has supported abolition of the death penalty, saying that as President he felt pain in deciding mercy petitions of death row convicts since most of them had “social and economic bias”. Responding to a Law Commission of India consultation paper on capital punishment, Kalam is one of the few to support abolition of the death sentence .

Former President Dr. A.P.J. Abdul Kalam

Quoting from his book Turning Points, he said, “One of the more difficult tasks for me as President was to decide on the issue of confirming capital punishment awarded by courts… to my surprise… almost all cases which were pending had a social and economic bias. This gave me an impression that we were punishing the person who was least involved in the enmity and who did not have a direct motive for committing the crime,” he said.

Kalam, however, said there was one case where he found the convict had committed the crime without doubt. “In that case I affirmed the sentence.” He was referring to Dhananjoy Chatterjee, who was executed for the rape and murder of an 18-year-old Kolkata girl.

Source: https://indianexpress.com/article/india/india-others/a-p-j-abdul-kalam-favours-abolition-of-death-penalty/ (Accessed 18 December 2018)

Are we carving out separate jurisdiction for death row prisoners, SC asks

Dhananjay Mahapatra, TNN Aug 9, 2013, 02.56AM IST

NEW DELHI: In a midnight order, the Supreme Court stopped Jabalpur jail authorities hours before they were to take Maganlal to the gallows on Thursday to execute the capital punishment given to him for hacking to death his five daughters, the eldest of whom was just six years, in Madhya Pradesh's Sehore district.

NGO 'People's Union for Democratic Rights' through senior advocate Colin Gonsalves swung into action late on Wednesday evening after the TOI website reported Maganlal's imminent execution in Jabalpur central jail and moved Chief Justice of India P Sathasivam, who held court at his residence close to midnight and ordered the authorities to put the scheduled execution on hold till Thursday.
On Thursday, sitting with Justice Ranjana Desai, Justice Sathasivam extended the stay on Maganlal's execution till further orders after Gonsalves doubted whether authorities had intimated the convict's family about the President's July 22 decision to reject his mercy plea.

Though the apex court has always acted in favour of right to life, a recent spate of petitions filed at the eleventh hour seeking stay of execution after rejection of mercy petitions by the President forced the bench of Justices Sathasivam and Desai to wonder aloud, "Are we creating a separate post-mercy rejection jurisdiction?"

There was a reason for the CJI to express his nuanced thoughts, because death warrants are issued against a condemned prisoner only after he goes through all tiers of judicial remedy - appeal in the high court, then in Supreme Court and following it up with review and curative petitions - to challenge the death sentence imposed on him by the trial court which awards capital sentence after finding the heinous crime fitting into the SC-devised 'rarest of rare' category.

In a similar late evening sitting on April 6 at the residence of Justice Sathasivam, he along with Justice MY Eqbal had stayed the execution of eight persons whose mercy pleas had been rejected. There too, PUDR was the public interest petitioner for the death row prisoners.

During the April 6 hearing, the bench of Justices Sathasivam and Eqbal had said it was entertaining the petition to ascertain whether proper communication had been sent to the relatives of these condemned prisoners whose mercy pleas had been rejected.

"It should not happen as it happened in the Jammu and Kashmir case (Afzal Guru's hanging). The intimation of the execution reached the relatives of the person (Afzal) after his hanging. That is bad. The relatives lost an opportunity to meet the condemned prisoner for one last time before his execution," the bench had said.

Gonsalves picked up the thread from the April 6 hearing and on Thursday argued before the bench of Justices Sathasivam and Desai that "no communication appears to have been sent to the family of Maganlal after the rejection of his mercy plea". The court allowed PUDR's lawyers - Rishabha Sancheti, Yug Mohit Chaudhry and Puja Sharma - to meet the family of the condemned prisoner and ascertain facts.

A trial court had on February 3, 2011, found Maganlal guilty of beheading his daughters Jamuna (1), Phool Kanwar (2), Aarti (4), Savita (5) and Leela (6) with an axe following a dispute over property with his two wives on June 11, 2010. The high court upheld the trial court decision seven months later and the Supreme Court dismissed his appeal on January 9 last year. 

Source: http://articles.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/2013-08-09/india/41236594_1_mercy-petitions-mercy-plea-execution [accessed 12th August 2013]

Tired of backlog, President Pranab expedites mercy plea of death-row convicts

Dailybhaskar.com | Apr 04, 2013, 10:18AM IST

New Delhi: President Pranab Mukherjee is using his powers under Article 72 of the Constitution to decide the fate of convicts awaiting death sentence.

According to reports, the President does not have any mercy petition pending before him and for this reason he is acting upon the mercy petitions putforth by death-row convicts unlike his predecessors.

On Wednesday, the president upheld fate of nine people convicted for heinous crimes while commuting death sentence to life term in two others. The decision was taken after the home ministry recommended rejection of mercy pleas in five cases and left two cases open for commutation of death sentence to life imprisonment with a rider that the life term should mean jail for the entire life of the convict and not just 20 years or 14 years in prison, claimed the report carried by Times of India.

The mercy files have been pending for years while moving to and fro between the President House and the home ministry, causing mental stress to both the convict and the victim's family. Since, he took over, Mukherjee has rejected mercy petitions in two high-profile cases - Ajmal Kasab and Afzal Guru were sent to gallows within less than three months. Mukherjee had rejected the mercy plea of Kasab on November 5 and of Afzal on February 3.

The report claimed that the President has disposed off eight death row convicts in five cases since he took over the office.

Source: http://daily.bhaskar.com/article/NAT-TOP-tired-of-backlog-president-pranab-expedites-mercy-plea-of-death-row-convicts-4225923-NOR.html (accessed on 5th April 2013)

74% of the mercy petitions were rejected by Presidents of India since 1981

74% of the mercy petitions were rejected by Presidents of India since 1981

ACHR condemns arbitrary rejection of mercy pleas of 9 death-row convicts

New Delhi: Asian Centre for Human Rights (ACHR) in its press release today stated that President Pranab Mukherjee has reduced the President’s Office to a rubber stamp of the Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) while rejecting mercy pleas of the death-row convicts as per the advice of the MHA. The President has yesterday rejected mercy pleas in five cases while commuting death sentence in two cases as advised by the Ministry of Home Affairs.

As per the RTI information provided by the Ministry of Home Affairs to the Asian Centre for Human Rights on 28 March 2013 (available at http://www.achrweb.org/press/2013/Mercypetitions.pdf), as on 28th March 2013, nine mercy petitions were pending before the President of India and these include death-row convicts Jafar Ali (Uttar Pradesh), Dharam Pal (Haryana) Praveen Kumar (Karnataka), Sonia and Sanjeev (Haryana), Sunder Singh (Uttarakhand), Shivu and Jadeswamy (Karnataka) and B A Umesh (Karnataka), Balwant Singh Rajoana (Chandigarh) and Manganlal (Madhya Pradesh).

“The case of life and death as per Article 72 of the Constitution must not be decided without objective criteria and therefore, the criteria for considering the mercy pleas must be developed to avoid arbitrariness in life and death matters. ” – stated Mr Suhas Chakma, Director of Asian Centre for Human Rights.

As per the RTI information provided by the Ministry of Home Affairs to the Asian Centre for Human Rights on 28 March 2013, since the Supreme Court laid down the rarest of rare case doctrine in the Bachan Singh Vs State of Punjab case, the Presidents of India had considered 112 mercy pleas since 1981 to 4 April 2013, out of which 83 mercy petitions or 74% of the mercy petitions were rejected while mercy pleas of only 31 death row-convicts were commuted to life imprisonment.

ACHR called upon the Government of India to abolish death penalty.

Source: http://kashmirwatch.com/humanrights.php/2013/04/05/74-of-the-mercy-petitions-were-rejected-by-presidents-of-india-since-1981.html (accessed on 5th April 2013)

Pranab sits on clemency petitions of 11 death row convicts

NEW DELHI Among the ceremonial invitations piled on the desk of India’s new President Pranab Mukherjee sits a small file that could provide the veteran politician with one of his biggest challenges. The folder contains 11 mercy petitions from condemned convicts for whom Mukherjee now represents the last legal obstacle between their death row cells and the hangman. As president, Mukherjee is required to decide on clemency petitions that are forwarded by the home ministry, in the final stage of death penalty appeals process. It is largely an inherited challenge. India has more than 400 people on death row and the courts hand down fresh death sentences every year. But Mukherjee’s three presidential predecessors, while signing off on a number of recommendations for clemency, often stonewalled when it came to appeals the ministry recommended should be rejected. As a result, only one execution has taken place in 15 years - that of a former security guard hanged in 2004 for the rape and murder of a 14-year-old girl. The lack of executions has led some to question why India retains a death penalty it so rarely enforces. Colin Gonsalves, an advocate in the Supreme Court and a founder of the Human Rights Law Network, points to surveys showing public opinion strongly in favour of capital punishment. “The idea of revenge is widely accepted here,” Gonsalves said. “If they try to abolish it, then the opposition will appropriate the issue and attack them,” Gonsalves said. Some legal experts believe the hiatus on executions partly reflects reluctance to hang people affiliated with an ethnic, religious or political group. “The government has to wait and check which groups will be upset before you execute someone,” said Supreme Court advocate Sanjay Hegde. Other observers say the main cause of the lack of executions has been the actions - or not - of Mukherjee’s three predecessors, KR Narayanan, APJ Abdul Kalam and Pratibha Patil. The recommendation of the home ministry can be returned for reconsideration - but only once, after which the president is constitutionally obliged to follow the ministry’s lead. However, there is no set time limit for providing the presidential signature, leaving room for endless delays. After taking office in 1997, Narayanan opted to sit on eight clemency petitions until his term expired. Kalam followed suit. As well as the eight he inherited, he received 17 more, but acted on only two. One was approved and the other rejected - leading to India’s last execution in 2004. The growing list of 23 pending appeals was then passed on to Patil who received another nine petitions during her tenure. In an attempt to clear the backlog, Patil acted on the home ministry’s recommendations to grant clemency in 19 cases and refuse it in two, including the case of Rajiv Gandhi’s murderers. She left 11 for Mukherjee, among them several toxic cases, including Mohammed Afzal Guru, a Kashmiri sentenced to death for his role in the 2001 attack on Parliament. Mukherjee may also come under pressure to reject any petition from Mohammed Kasab, the sole surviving gunman from the 2008 Mumbai attacks, who was sentenced to death two years ago. Source: Oman Tribune Thursday, August 30, 2012 http://www.omantribune.com/index.php?page=news&id=126078&heading=India [accessed on 30th August 2012]

India’s kindest president commutes 23 death penalty to life term

PTI: Feb 21, 2012

New Delhi: President Pratibha Patil has commuted death sentences of 23 petitioners to life imprisonment during her tenure, which is over 90 percent of the total pardon granted since 1981.

On 9 February, she accepted the clemency petition of Sushil Murmu, pending since 2004, who was convicted for giving sacrifice of a nine-year old boy in Jharkhand for his own prosperity, an RTI response from Rashtrapati Bhavan said.

It said that since 1981, 91 convicts knocked the doors of Rashtrapati Bhavan seeking commutation of their death sentences to life imprisonment. Of these, petitions of 31 individuals were accepted out of which 23 were during her tenure.

According to the reply provided to applicant Subhash Agrawal, 18 mercy petitions were still pending before the president.

Patil, however, in exceptional cases, has rejected the petitions of five individuals which include the three killers of Rajiv Gandhi—Santham, Murughan and Arivu—and Davinder Pal Singh and Mahedra Nath Das of Assam who had murdered 68-year-old Harakanta Das, the then secretary of the Guwahati Truck Drivers Association at a roadside stall.

In Murmu’s case, his sentence was commuted to life by Patil even though he was convicted for the killing, which was termed by the Supreme Court as “an illustrative and most exemplary case to be treated as the ‘rarest of rare cases’ in which death sentence is and should be the rule, with no exception whatsoever”.

Source: http://www.firstpost.com/fwire/indias-kindest-president-commutes-23-death-penalty-to-life-term-220419.html [accessed 23rd Feb 2012]

SC notices to Centre, State on death penalty

The Assam Tribune: Guwahati, Wednesday, February 08, 2012

NEW DELHI, Feb. 7 – The Supreme Court has issued notices to Assam Government and the Centre in response to a petition filed by Kusumbala Das, mother of Mahendra Nath Das, who is on death row.

His mother has through her counsel pleaded that his death penalty be commuted to life sentence. The case was raised as an urgent matter in the Court of Justice AK Patnaik and Justice S Kumar.

After hearing the petitioner, the Bench issued notices to Government of Assam and the Union Government.

Das is awaiting execution in Jorhat, after the President of India rejected his mercy petition. This would be the first execution in India since 2004.

Das was sentenced to death in August 1997 for a murder in Guwahati, Assam in 1996. His mercy petition was rejected by the President of India in May 2011, following the advice of theGovernment of India.

The judicial process was completed after the High Court confirmed the death sentence in February 1998 and the Supreme Court rejected the appeal in May 1999. A mercy petition was sent to the Government of India in 2000.

Amnesty International is concerned that the eleven-year delay in announcing the verdict of the mercy petition and the resultant prolonged stay ondeath row may amount to cruel, inhuman and degrading punishment.