Punjab HC confirms death but defers hanging of killers of Hoshiarpur boy to Oct 12

A division Bench headed by Justice Surya Kant of the Punjab and Haryana High Court on Wednesday paved the way for hanging of two persons who had killed Abhi Verma, a 16-year-old boy in Hoshiarpur in 2008. Their hanging, however, has been deferred till October 12 allowing them to challenge the High Court judgment before the Supreme Court. The two killers, Jasbir Singh and Vikram Walia had moved the High Court challenging their death sentence, which has already been upheld by the Supreme Court. The two were to be hanged on October 5. To delay their hanging, the duo had moved the High Court taking a legal ground that death awarded to them under section 364-A of the Indian Penal Code (killing for ransom) is not legally tenable. The petitioners took the ground that section 364-A of IPC deals with offences committed against a state government or Central government and not against a private individual. Counsels for Punjab, Haryana and Central government had opposed the petition filed by the duo and had averred that death sentence be awarded to the two killers. Dismissing the petition filed by the two, the High Court gave a go ahead for the hanging of the two. However, the hanging has been ordered to be put in abeyance till October 12 so that the two can challenge the HC order before apex court by October 12. The two convicts had abducted Abhi Verma, son of a goldsmith from Hoshiarpur, for ransom. A Hoshiarpur Court had awarded death to three accused, including one Sonia, whose death sentence was commuted to life imprisonment by the Supreme Court last year. However, the apex court had upheld the hanging of Walia and Singh. Source: http://www.indianexpress.com/news/punjab-hc-confirms-death-but-defers-hanging-of-killers-of-hoshiarpur-boy-to-oct-12/1011282/ [accessed on 8th October 2012]

Death penalty for five family members in 'honour killing'

Five members of a family in the Indian capital, Delhi, have been sentenced to death for the brutal murder of a young couple in 2010. Yogesh and Asha were tortured and electrocuted in a so-called honour killing by members of Asha's family who objected to the union on caste grounds. Asha's parents, her uncle, aunt and a cousin were arrested the day after the crime. They were convicted on Monday. Last year the Supreme Court said honour killings should get the death penalty. There are no statistics on the number of honour killings across the country, but according to one recent study, hundreds of people are killed each year for falling in love or marrying against their families' wishes. Most parents in India still prefer arranged marriages within their own caste and relationships outside of caste are frowned upon. The couple, who were neighbours in the Gokulpuri area of north-east Delhi, were taken by Asha's parents to her uncle's house in the Swaroop Nagar area of the city where the torture and killings took place. Asha's family was opposed to the couple's plans to get married because Yogesh belonged to a lower caste. All five accused were convicted on Monday for "murder and voluntarily causing hurt". "It can be safely concluded that the prosecution has been able to prove beyond reasonable doubt that the accused persons had caused the death of the victims with the common intention after giving them merciless beatings by tying them with rope and thereafter electrocuting them on various parts of their body," Additional Sessions Judge Ramesh Kumar said on Monday. IANS Source:www.southasiamail.com/news.php?id=107083 [accessed on 8th October 2012]

Qasab deserves legal aid to draft mercy plea

Advocate Yug Chaudhry on why due process must be followed even in this rarest of rare cases Posted On Thursday, October 04, 2012 at 02:04:36 AM A week after Ajmal Qasab was sentenced to death, advocate Yug Chaudhry wrote to the Home Minister and the NHRC, pointing out that Qasab was entitled to legal aid in drafting his mercy petition. Dismayed at the news that the mercy petition, drafted without legal help, has been rejected, Chaudhry tells Jyoti Punwani why it is necessary to follow the spirit and letter of the law - even in Qasab’s case. Why are you so concerned with Qasab getting legal aid at this stage? Haven’t we given him a fair trial, despite his obvious guilt? Yes we have given him due process thus far, and that is why we must continue to do so. Qasab has a right to file mercy petitions before the governor and the President, but he lacks the wherewithal to so. He is illiterate, a stranger to our laws, and a foreigner abandoned by his countrymen. Since he is clearly ill-equipped to make a mercy petition which it is his right to make, he must be given the necessary assistance. He also has a right under our constitution to legal aid at every stage of the judicial and post-judicial proceedings. For rights to be meaningful, they must be accompanied by facilities that render those rights accessible. If we believe in our Constitution and the rule of law, we cannot make an exception in his case. Can a legally drafted mercy petition make any difference to Qasab’s fate? He cannot plead innocence or lack of a fair trial. Neither would a fair trial have made any difference to his fate, but would that have been a reason to deny him one? The question is not whether a mercy petition would make a difference, but whether he is entitled to make one and to receive the necessary assistance. The moment we allow ourselves, through sheer majoritarian sentiment, to decide outcomes without due process, we put all our liberties in jeopardy and negate the very essence of rights, which is to protect each of us from ad-hoc, majoritarian caprice. The scope of a mercy petition encompasses more than innocence and a fair trial, and few lay persons, let alone an illiterate person, would be competent to draft one unaided. Given that the death penalty exists in India, doesn’t Qasab deserve it? An illiterate boy of 13 sold by his family to the LeT, brainwashed into jihad, transformed into a killing machine and sent as a footsoldier to India are mitigating factors that entitle him to the lesser penalty. Qasab’s crime should be contexualised without minimising it, and then we should ask ourselves why are we clamouring for Qasab’s execution while content with life sentences for Babu Bajrangi and Maya Kodnani who perpetrated the Narodya Patya massacres. They killed more or less the same number of people in an equally gruesome manner. Maya Kodnani held public office, and turned on those she was charged to look after and protect. If she doesn’t deserve the death sentence, why does he? How else can Qasab be punished, given the enormity of his crime? Keep him in prison for the rest of his life. Treat him like a human being so that he becomes human again and realises the enormity of his crime. Allow for the possibility of repentance and reformation. Do you feel Qasab deserves mercy? I think all of us - the best and the worst - are in need of mercy, and it is only by showing mercy that, morally, we ourselves become entitled to receiving it. Bereft of mercy, our society would be impoverished and inhuman, for mercy is quintessentially a human quality, not found elsewhere in the natural world. In classical thought and in many faiths, mercy is the manifestation of divinity within us, of a god who is the ultimate bestower of mercy. As for “deserving”, give each man his deserts and who shall escape a whipping? Justice and mercy operate in mutually exclusive realms. It is only when justice demands that punishment be inflicted that mercy comes into play. Mercy tempers justice, makes it less exacting, more humane. Excluding a fellow human being from entitlement to mercy has nothing to recommend it except a very base blood lust that we encourage at our peril. If we have to become a more humane and compassionate society, and leave a better, less blood-thirsty world behind for our children, we have to curb our instinct for bloody retribution. Source: http://www.mumbaimirror.com/article/2/2012100420121004020503161a2c1a95e/Qasab-deserves-legal-aid-to-draft-mercy-plea.html [accessed on 4th October 2012]

28-yr-old sentenced to death for killing parents, pregnant wife to marry lover

A man was sentenced to death on Tuesday for killing his pregnant wife and foster parents. Nitin Verma (28) killed them because he wanted to marry a neighbour. Holding that Verma was a “menace to society”, Additional Sessions Judge Virender Bhat said life imprisonment was “inadequate punishment” for his crime. Verma had repeatedly stabbed his handicapped father, mother and his six-month pregnant wife to death in April 2008. “There was no justification for the convict to commit the grotesque killings. The convict appears to be without any remorse,” said the judge. The court said Verma had stabbed them brutally and deserved no leniency. It also noted that the murders seemed methodical and planned, with Verma first killing his father on the ground floor of the house, then his mother on the first floor before rushing to his room to kill his wife. Public Prosecutor Aditya Chauhan had pleaded with the court to sentence Verma to death as he had murdered his aged parents and his wife in “a brutal and diabolic manner”. “Verma was in a dominating position in his family. All family members were at his mercy. This calls for harsher punishment. Verma was morally and legally bound to take care of his family, but instead murdered them in a brutal and barbaric manner,” the court said. “The convict wiped out his whole family to continue his liaison with a girl and to marry her. Nitin is awarded death sentence under Section 302 of the Indian Penal Code,” it said. Verma had been adopted by his parents when he was a child. “When he did not spare his own parents and wife, what respect would he show for the lives of others? The convict is like a live bomb, which has the potential of causing a huge catastrophe if not destroyed at the earliest,” the court said. Source: http://www.indianexpress.com/news/28yrold-sentenced-to-death-for-killing-parents-pregnant-wife-to-marry-lover/997931/0 [accessed on 8th September 2012]

Six convicts in death row in Bengal jails

Saibal Sen, TNN Sep 5, 2012, 04.04PM IST KOLKATA: With Supreme Court upholding Ajmal Kasab's death sentence, six death row convicts in Bengal spending the life in the condemned cells in Alipore and Presidency Jails still await to know their fate. Among the six, three appeals are now pending in the Supreme Court; the rest in Calcutta high court. In one case, the convict's kin has informed jail authorities that the high court has commuted the death sentence to life but the order is yet to reach Alipore jail. The last death sentence in the country was executed in Alipore central jail on August 14, 2004. Dhananjoy Chaterjee, 39, was hanged for raping and murdering a 14-year-old girl in Bhowanipore on March 5, 1990. Chatterjee was a security-guard of the complex where the child stayed. Before that a serial killer Auto Shankar was hanged in Chennai central jail on April 27, 1995. Before Dhananjoy, the last execution in Bengal was also in Alipore central jail in 1993 when murder convicts, Kartik Sil and Sukumar Burman, were hanged. Since Dhananjoy's hanging courts in Bengal had passed several death sentences, the first was by a special sessions court which sentenced to death Aftab Ansari and Jamaluddin Naser to death on April 27, 2005 in the USIS attack case. Ansari is in Alipore jail since May 3, 2002; while Naser was brought here before him, on February 21 that year. The death sentence was upheld by the Calcutta high court prompting the duo to appeal against it in the Supreme Court. The other case which pending in the Supreme Court, sources said, is the death sentence awarded by the General Security Force court March 2, 2007 to former BSF head constable Balbir Singh. It is learnt the Guwahati high court has already turned down Singh's appeal against it prompting him to move the Supreme Court. Singh - admitted to Alipore jail on October 6, 2010 - was convicted for murdering his superior Deputy Commandant Kameswar Singh for ticking him off for dereliction of duty while posted at Rajnagar outpost in South Tripura district. Balbir then gunned down Assistant Commandant Alok Ranjan as he had witnessed the killing of the other officer. Among the others who've also appealed against their death sentence in Calcutta high court are Sambhu Lohar (in Alipore jail) and Kebal Roy (in Presidency jail). Sambhu was sentenced to death by a Suri court on September 15, 2010 for murdering two people inside an Sainthia oil mill. The victims were first drugged and later hacked to death with a chopper later their bodies were set on to destroy evidence. The day the Additional Sessions Judge, 3rd court, Suri sentenced Sambhu to death he was immediately brought to Alipore jail and send to the condemned cell. Roy was sentenced to death by a Kolkata court on September 24, 2008. Roy had murdered his employers - Tarachand (68) and Sarada Devi Banka (56) - in their Mansarovar Apartments home in Camac Street on April 18, 2005. Roy, police said, also stole Rs 20-lakhs worth of valuables. After the murder, Roy fled Kolkata and was arrested from his native village Simultala in Bihar a month later. Roy is in Presidency jail ever since his arrest. On August 25, this year, they've informed that a Calcutta high court division bench has commuted Bagdi's death sentence to life imprisonment. The formal court orders are yet to reach Alipore jail, though. These convicts aren't the only ones in condemned cells till a few days back. Nikku Yadav, the domestic help who was convicted of murdering his employer Rabindra Kaur Luthra in her Tripura Enclave flat in Ballygunge Circular Road on February 15, 2007, was another death row convict till the Calcutta high court on October 7, 2010 commuted his death sentence to life. Nikku had been handed death by the Alipore Sessions Court on August 29, 2008. source: http://articles.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/2012-09-05/kolkata/33614556_1_alipore-jail-central-jail-death-sentence [accessed on 8th September 2012]

Assam man on death row fasts to end capital punishment

Samudra Gupta Kashyap : Guwahati, Fri Aug 31 2012, 01:43 hrs Waiting for a hangman for over 17 years now since the Sessions Judge of Kamrup awarded him a death penalty — and one that was subsequently upheld by the Gauhati High Court and the Supreme Court — Mahendra Nath Das has launched a “Gandhian” fast-unto-death in the Jorhat Central Jail, demanding abolition of capital punishment. “Capital punishment, like so many other things, is a legacy left behind by the British who treated us like slaves. I have been waiting in the prison with a death penalty for 17 years now. At this moment I pray to you to not only do away with my death sentence but also release me from prison as I have already served imprisonment more than a life sentence,” Das, who was shifted to the Jorhat Medical College Hospital after he took ill on the third day of his fast-unto-death on Wednesday, said in a letter addressed to the Chief Justice of India. Das was sentenced to death by the Sessions Judge, Kamrup (Guwahati) on August 18, 1997 in connection with the murder of one Harakanta Das in Guwahati on April 24, 1996. The death sentence was confirmed by the HC on February 3, 1998. The SC upheld the death sentence on May 14, 1999. A mercy petition that Das had filed before the President in 1999, was rejected in 2011. Source: The Indian Express http://www.indianexpress.com/news/assam-man-on-death-row-fasts-to-end-capital-punishment/995713/ [accessed on 1st September 2012]

How Kasab might change Mumbai's take on capital punishment

1 Sep, 2012, 02.22AM IST, Vikram Doctor,ET Bureau At some point in the last century, executions within Bombay itself stopped altogether, with the gallows being moved to Yerawada Jail in Pune. It isn't clear when the actual last execution in the city took place, but the last in Maharashtra was in 1995 when Amrutlal Joshi was executed for murdering three members of the Sadarangani family in Bombay's Khar suburb. That execution was the 100th conducted by Arjun Jadhav, the state's hangman, but nearly all were done in Pune. Kasab will have to be taken there too, unless the authorities decided to build temporary gallows at Arthur Road jail. Joshi's execution was the second last in India (Auto Shankar's execution in Salem is considered to be the second last, but it was on April 27, 1995 and ToI 's report dates Joshi's execution to July12). After that Dhananjoy Chatterjee was executed in Kolkata in August 2004 and since then, despite the furious promises of politicians and appeals by TV anchors, there have been none. It is called for, of course, after every violent crime, and the sentence is often passed, yet it is not carried out. Kasab will probably change that. The scale of the crime he was involved in was so horrific and public, amounting almost to armoured invasion, that it almost demands a symbolic response and the Supreme Court's verdict reflects this. Cynical calculations also suggest that the General Election of 2014 makes it likely, since elections and executions share a dubious history. Politicians have long used executions as a way to show their toughness - for example, French President Giscard d'Estaing was accused of allowing the last executions in French history, in 1977, to help his dwindling re-election prospects. But will Mumbai really cheer when Kasab hangs? Certainly, many like the politicians, aggressive TV anchors and, more understandably, the families bereaved by 26/11 will. And for all the trends away from capital punishment noted above, it should be remembered that this is also the city which tacitly approved of the era of encounter killings staged by the police. These de facto executions helped bring an end to the worse of gang violence, but it also very probably killed off a few innocents, which is exactly what the long judicial process for capital punishment is meant to avoid. To which many in the city would shrug, and say it is sad, but overall it worked, and there were none of the delays and wildly escalating costs of the Kasab trial. For a city always on the run and in pursuit of wealth, it is this part of the trial that has been the most annoying (along with the security restrictions on the neighbourhood near Arthur Road jail). But there is another uncomfortable result of the delay and that has been Kasab himself. Because while it is very easy to see Kasab-the-Terrorist as the "most hated man" in India, the reactions to Kasab-the-Kid-inthe-Dock are a bit more complex. You can see this in the reactions of the police who have been guarding and dealing with him. While never failing in their strict duty, it has been possible to see a slightly softening in their tone as they describe his evident ignorance and naivety, his often disarmingly simple requests and even childishness, which can be seen in the fact that he is alive at all: while his comrades understood they would probably die, and did, when the moment came Kasab clung to life, which is why this drama is with us at all. None of this should suggest that the police or lawyers have become fond of Kasab, but he is a familiar and understandable type, unlike cold and determined ideologues like Abu Jundal. Unless he's managed the most amazing of acting jobs, Kasab is the simple small town kid who came to a big city and got caught up in things beyond his imagination. He could be the kid whistling in the cinema at the latest Eid blockbuster, or riding on top of trains, or hustling you into buying a dubious cellphone on the street or, for that matter, stealing your own cellphone, or maybe even becoming shooter with a gang, but always something recognisable to Mumbai. And yet he did what he did on 26/11, which is a chilling thought since it suggests how easily people can flip. But if, to modify Hannah Arendt's phrase for Adolf Eichmann, he embodies not the banality, but the sheer ordinariness of evil, it still puts him somewhat short of that completely black bogeyman that all those vengeful voices in the media want to see strung up. Some might even acknowledge that Kasab is what Mahatma Gandhi meant when he explained, in his magazine Harijan, in April, 1940, why he opposed capital punishment: "Under a State governed according to the principles of ahimsa, a murderer would be sent to a penitentiary and there given every chance of reforming himself. All crime is a kind of disease and should be treated as such." When Kasab walks up those steps, at least some in the city that he attacked will remember what Gandhi said. Source: The Economic Times http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/politics/nation/how-kasab-might-change-mumbais-take-on-capital-punishment/articleshow/16094167.cms?curpg=2 [accessed on 1st September 2012]