[Deathpenalty] [SPAM] death penalty news----worldwide

[Rick Halperin]

March 9



MALAYSIA/AUSTRALIA:

Perth man charged, facing death penalty


A Perth man is facing the death penalty in Malaysia after being formally 
charged with drug trafficking.

Dominic Jude Christopher Bird, 32, was refused bail after his appearance in the 
Malaysian High Court today, where he was officially charged under section 39B 
of the Dangerous Drugs Act - which carries the mandatory death penalty.

Bird’s lawyer, Malaysian-based Australian Tani Scivetti, said she had been 
denied access to her client and was only informed of Bird’s High Court 
appearance and formal charges late in the afternoon.

Bird was arrested by undercover officers during a police sting at a coffee shop 
in the Malaysian capital of Kuala Lumpur on March 1, where police alleged he 
tried to sell them 225g of methamphetamines.

A search of his nearby apartment uncovered a smaller quantity of drugs and led 
to the arrests of 2 local men and a Filipino woman, who are also in custody.

Under Malaysian law, a person convicted of possessing more than 50g of 
methamphetamines is declared a drug trafficker and faces a mandatory death 
sentence.

Ms Scivetti said she was uncertain what quantity of drugs Bird had been 
formally charged with, as she hadn’t seen the charge sheet yet.

But she confirmed he now faced the death penalty.

“Today, without informing us or the (Australian) embassy, Dominic was brought 
before a judge and charged with 39B, which carries the death penalty,” Ms 
Scivetti said.

The charges were laid by Malaysia’s Department of Public Prosecutions.

Ms Scivetti speculated prosecutors must already have secured a chemist’s report 
of the substances allegedly found in Bird’s possession.

“They would have had to have had the chemist’s report to officially charge 
him,” she said.

Ms Scivetti said she had not visited her client since he was formally charged 
this morning, but said he was in a “state of shock” yesterday after a 
closed-door hearing at the Jin Jang lockup tentatively charged him with drug 
trafficking and remanded him in custody.

He has since been moved from his holding cell at the Dang Wang Police Station 
to the maximum security Sungai Buloh Remand Prison.

Bird’s next High Court appearance will be on May 25.

Ms Scivetti said she would try to visit her client tomorrow morning, and 
expected to file Contempt of Court charges over police handling of the case.

“The magistrate ordered yesterday that remand be extended for 7 days and that 
counsel be entitled to visit their client for two hours a day, commencing 
yesterday,” she said.

“Yesterday we went to the police and requested to see Dominic and they said 
they were reviewing the matter and denied us access.

“They also didn’t inform us of his High Court appearance this morning, or that 
they were laying official charges.

“That court order has totally been ignored.”

Ms Scivetti said it had also been reported to the magistrate that Bird had been 
assaulted by police in custody on March 5, after he claimed he was blindfolded 
and “slapped around”.

“We asked her to note the fact that he was assaulted,” she said.

However, Malaysian Deputy Director of Narcotics Harris Wong denied Bird had 
been assaulted.

“No, no, no, no - I’m not aware of any assault,” he told AAP.

Relatives confirmed Bird’s Perth-based father, Clayton, had flown to Malaysia 
on Friday, but Ms Scivetti said he had not yet visited his son in custody.

She said she was unaware of the status of Bird’s co-accused but that the 
arrested Filipino woman was believed to be a 55-year old maid hired to look 
after his luxury apartment, just 20m from the coffee shop where he had been 
arrested.

The Australian Government has refused to speculate on Bird’s case, only to 
reiterate it opposes the death penalty and would seek a stay of execution if he 
were convicted.

Malaysia has executed 3 Australians for drug offences.

Kevin Barlow and Brian Chambers were hanged in July 1986, followed by Michael 
McAuliffe in June 1993.

(source: The West Australian)






INDIA:

Death for Kasab? Don’t be sure; SC has swung both ways


Had the Pakistani terrorist Mohammed Ajmal Amir Kasab struck in Ireland, UK, 
Ukraine or Turkmenistan and killed the 166 innocent people that he did in 
Mumbai on 26 November 2008, the question of death penalty for him would not 
have arisen.

So also in the case of the assassins of former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi or 
Afzal Guru, convicted of the 2001 attack on Parliament.

This is because the death penalty stands abolished not just in the four 
countries mentioned above but in as many as 140 countries across the world. 
Although India is among the 58 countries, along with the United States, China 
and Japan, which uphold the death penalty, it has been moving cautiously 
towards a moratorium on capital punishment – the first big step towards the 
abolition of the death penalty.

The SC has been emphasising the need to give the death penalty only in the 
'rarest of rare' cases.

While there are 300 people on Indian death row, in the last 17 years just 1 
person – Dhananjoy Chatterjee – was hanged for raping and killing a school 
girl.

In 1983, the Supreme Court gave a landmark ruling in the Bachchan Singh vs 
State of Punjab case that the death penalty should be applied in the “rarest of 
rare” cases. Since then, a large number of death sentences given by the high 
courts and other lower courts have been commuted to life terms.

Recently, on 28 February, a Supreme Court bench comprising Justice AK Patnaik 
and Justice Swatanter Kumar elaborated on its clear preference for life rather 
than death while commuting a death sentence awarded by a Bilaspur trial court 
to life imprisonment. The case was related to four convicts who were held 
guilty of raping a married woman who died later. Justice Kumar emphatically 
observed that “the basic principle, stated repeatedly” by the Supreme Court is 
that “life imprisonment is the rule and death penalty an exception.” (For full 
details, see www.legalblog.in/).

At the same time, he justified the imposition of the death penalty citing 
various judgements of the SC such as the Dhanonjoy Chatterjee vs State of West 
Bengal (1994) case in which a security guard was sentenced to death after he 
raped and murdered a young girl whose mother had complained against him of eve 
teasing.

As Justice Kumar explained, “In our opinion, the measure of punishment in a 
given case must depend upon the atrocity of the crime; the conduct of the 
criminal and the defenceless and unprotected state of the victim. Imposition of 
appropriate punishment is the manner in which the courts respond to the 
society’s cry for justice against the criminals. Justice demands that courts 
should impose punishment befitting the crime so that the courts reflect public 
abhorrence of the crime. The courts must not only keep in view the rights of 
the criminal but also the rights of the victim of crime and the society at 
large while considering imposition of appropriate punishment.”

He explained that while deciding on the death penalty, the court seeks to draw 
a balance between the “aggravating circumstances” of the crime and the 
“mitigating circumstances”. While heinous crimes such as acts of terrorism, 
murder, rape, armed dacoity, kidnapping would fall under aggravating 
circumstances, “mitigating circumstances” would include the manner and 
circumstances under which the offence was committed, extreme mental or 
emotional disturbance and extreme provocation. The age of the accused would be 
“a relevant consideration but not a determinative factor by itself”.

Kasab’s arguments for a review of his death sentence that was awarded by a 
trial court on 6 May 2010 and upheld by the Bombay High Court on 21 February 
2011, tilts heavily in favour of the factors listed under the “mitigating 
circumstances”. For example, senior advocate and amicus curie Raju 
Ramachandran, who argued the case on behalf of Kasab in the SC, cited his young 
age (21 at the time of the terror attack) as an important factor that had to be 
considered. Also, that he was not acting on his own but was under the influence 
of “skewed religious faith and false ideology”.

The prosecution lawyer Ujjwal Nikam has categorically stated that the terrorist 
should be awarded capital punishment as “This is the rarest of rare cases. He 
should not be entitled to any mercy.”

While the death penalty is legal in India, there is a growing lobby of highly 
influential persons and others who are pressing for its abolition. They include 
such notables as the senior Supreme Court lawyer Colin Gonsalves, former 
Supreme Court Justice AK Ganguly and Justice KT Thomas, whose bench upheld the 
death penalty in the Rajiv Gandhi assassination case.

While speaking in his personal capacity at a law school in November 2011, 
Justice Ganguly described capital punishment as “barbaric” and “irresponsible” 
but legal. According to him, even the “rarest of rare” doctrines was flawed as 
it is “a grey area as it depended on the interpretation of individual judges.”

Internationally, Amnesty International is in the forefront in challenging the 
death penalty while calling it “the ultimate denial of human rights” and “the 
premeditated and cold-blooded killing of a human being by the state in the name 
of justice.” According to Amnesty, in 2010, more than 2,000 people were 
executed in China followed by 252-plus in Iran, 60-plus in North Korea, 53-plus 
in Yemen, 46 in USA and 27-plus in Saudi Arabia.

Although it is now 20 years since the Rajiv Gandhi assassination, the review 
petition on the death penalty awarded to the 3 assassins- Murugan, Santhan and 
Perarivalan is continuing to linger in the courts. The Madras High Court has 
now set March 27 as the next date of hearing on the appeal by the convicts that 
there was a 11 year delay in the disposal of their mercy petition by the 
president.

The death sentence of the 4th convict- Nalini- was commuted to life sentence in 
September 2011 following the intervention of Congress president Sonia Gandhi.

Commenting on India’s growing ambivalence on the contentious issue of death 
penalty, The Economist observed in October 2011 that the case of Ajmal Kasab is 
being viewed as a “big test” for India. “It will be a brave Indian who demands 
that he be spared.”

(source: First Post India)






CHINA:

China adheres to limiting use of death penalty


China is committed to limiting the use of death penalty and has always been 
very prudent in using capital punishment, an official with the top legislature 
said Thursday.

The amendment to the Criminal Law, which was passed in 2011, reduced the types 
of crimes punishable by death by 20 percent, or 13 in number, said Lang Sheng, 
vice-chairman of the Legislative Affairs Commission of the National People's 
Congress (NPC) Standing Committee, at a press conference during the ongoing 
parliamentary session.

That a death penalty has to undergo review by the Supreme People's Court is 
another effort China has made to control and limit the use of capital 
punishment, he said.

On January 1, 2007, the Supreme People's Court resumed the process of reviewing 
and approving all death sentences to ensure that lower courts' verdicts are 
accurate.

"Such a procedure reflects China's prudence in the use of the death penalty," 
Lang said.

A draft amendment to the nation's Criminal Procedure Law, submitted Thursday to 
the ongoing 5th session of the 11th National People's Congress (NPC) for third 
reading, further specifies the procedures for the Supreme People's Court to 
review death penalty cases in order that such cases will be handled "with 
sufficient care" and "legal oversight" will be strengthened.

According to the draft, the supreme court shall issue an order approving or 
disapproving a death sentence after reviewing it. If the supreme court 
overrules the death sentence, it may remand the case for retrial or revise the 
judgement thereof.

Besides, during the reviewing proceedings, the supreme court may question the 
defendant and the defense attorney's opinions shall be heard if he so requests, 
according to the amendment.

China's current Criminal Procedure Law was enacted in 1979 and amended in 1996.

(source: Xinhua)