[Deathpenalty] death penalty news----worldwide

[Rick Halperin]

Aug. 6




INDIA:

History revisited----Bhagat Singh and Godse: How India's stand on death penalty 
changed between 2 killings


After the British executed Bhagat Singh and his comrades, the nation resolved 
to do away with capital punishment. The mood changed on January 30, 1948 - the 
day Gandhi was killed.

On March 23, 1931, when the British government sent Bhagat Singh and his 
comrades Sukhdev and Rajguru to gallows, millions all over India mourned. Angry 
condolence meets, hysterical processions and strikes in factories, schools and 
colleges crystallised a national consensus that Independent India would have no 
place for capital punishment.

The mood was reflected in a forthright stand that the Indian National Congress 
took a week later. In its three-day Karachi session that began on March 29, 
1931, the Congress passed a series of resolutions on Fundamental Rights and 
Duties, Labour, Taxation and Expenditure, and Economic and Social Programme.

Clause XIII of the resolution on Fundamental Rights and Duties declared: "There 
shall be no capital punishment."

The Karachi resolution, which was drafted by Jawaharlal Nehru and revised by 
Mahatma Gandhi, is significant because it provided the implicit socio-juridical 
basis upon which the modern Indian nation was to be founded and whose spirit 
reflected in the Indian Constitution. The All India Congress Committee that met 
on August 6-8, 1931 made this point clear by declaring that "any Constitution 
which may be agreed to on its behalf should provide for" the Karachi 
Resolution. Indeed, the Constituent Assembly, which deliberated between 
December 9, 1946, and November 26, 1949, incorporated most of aspects of the 
Karachi Resolution in the Indian Constitution.

But by the time the Constituent Assembly took up the issue of capital 
punishment, the adherents of Hindutva had sufficiently disoriented the mood of 
the nation by brutally killing Mahatma Gandhi on January 30, 1948. The culture 
of compassion that had created a national consensus against capital punishment 
in 1931 got sabotaged by the assassination.

Sanctity of human life

Thus, when on November 29, 1948, ZH Lari, a Muslim League member of the 
Constituent Assembly from the United Provinces (as Uttar Pradesh was called 
then), moved an amendment to abolish the capital punishment, many of the 
Constitution makers were horrified. The assassination of Gandhi by Nathuram 
Godse, an adherent of Hindutva, had hardened the attitudes of many of the 
Congress leaders who in 1931 had so enthusiastically backed the resolution 
against capital punishment.

Moving the amendment in the Constituent Assembly on November 29, 1948, Lari 
laid out 3 reasons why capital punishment should be abolished:

"The 1st consideration is that human judgment is not infallible. Every judge, 
every tribunal is liable to err. But capital punishment is irrevocable. Once 
you decide to award the sentence, the result is that the man is gone. [...] The 
2nd consideration is that human life is sacred and its sanctity is, I think, 
accepted by all. [...] A man's life is taken away if there is no other way to 
prevent the loss of other human lives. But the question is whether capital 
punishment is necessary for the sake of preventing crimes which result in such 
loss of human lives. I venture to submit that at least thirty countries have 
come to the conclusion that they can do without it and they have been going on 
in this way for at least 10 years, or 20 years, without any ostensible or 
appreciable increase in crimes. [...] The 3rd consideration is that this is a 
punishment which is really shocking and brutal and does not correspond with the 
sentiments which prevail now in the present century."

While concluding, Lari said: "Lastly I would submit that the reformative 
element in punishment is the most important one, and that should be the 
dominant consideration."

After Lari moved the amendment, Vice President HC Mookerjee, who was in the 
chair, adjourned the House for the day.

Voices of opposition

The next day, on November 30, 1948, two members of the Constituent Assembly - 
both from the Indian National Congress - spoke on the issue and opposed the 
amendment seeking abolition of death penalty. The 1st, Congress leader from 
Bihar Amiya Kumar Ghosh, kept his opposition muted, wavering between technical 
and substantive reasons for his opposition to the amendment. The 2nd speaker, K 
Hanumanthaiah from Mysore, minced no words and even referred to Godse while 
arguing against Lari's amendment.

In his argument, Ghosh said: "I think that with the growth of consciousness, 
with the development of society, the state should revise a punishment of this 
nature but the proper place of doing such a thing is not the Constitution. We 
can do it by amending the Indian Penal Code where such penalty is prescribed 
for different offences."

He then added: "We are now passing through a transitional period, serious 
problems are confronting us, different sorts of situation are arising every 
day, and so it is quite possible that at times the State may require imposition 
of such grave penalties for offences which may endanger it and the society."

Hanumanthaiah's argument was straightforward. "If every man who takes away the 
life of another is assured that his life would be left untouched and it is a 
question of merely being imprisoned, probably the deterrent nature of the 
punishment will lose its value. [...] Therefore, if a man who kills another is 
assured that he has a chance of being released after seven or eight or ten 
years, as the case may be, then everybody would get encouragement to pursue the 
method of revenge, if he has got any. For example, let us take this Godse 
incident."

After a brief interruption by the Vice President, who asked him not to refer to 
"this particular individual", Hanumanthaiah continued: "If a man who resorts to 
kill an important or a great man and if he is assured that he would be released 
after 7 years or 8 years, as the case may be, he would not hesitate to repeat 
what he has done, and conditions being what they are today, it would be very 
unwise from the point of view of the safety of the state and stability of 
society, to abolish capital sentence."

Immediately after Hanumanthaiah concluded, Dr BR Ambedkar, chairman of the 
Constitution Drafting Committee, declared that he did not "accept the 
amendment".

The atmosphere, left vitiated by Gandhi's murder, was no longer conducive to 
carry forward the pledge the nation had taken following the execution of Bhagat 
Singh and his comrades. It's ironical that the assassination of the man who 
said an eye for an eye makes the whole world blind proved to be the turning 
point when India opted for capital punishment.

(source: scroll.in)

*******************

State trains hangmen for future executions----Prisons dept asked to prepare 3-4 
constables for the job; Maha has 41 on death row.


The state home office has directed the prisons department to train at least 
three to four constables as hangmen to supplement the number of executioners 
available in the state, which has now dwindled to 1, and prepare for future 
hangings. The sole remaining executioner, whose last hanging was that of Ajmal 
Kasab, on November 21, 2012, was tasked with carrying out Yakub Memon's death 
sentence, at Nagpur Central Jail last week.

"When hanging was common, we had many trained hangmen in our ranks, but they 
have since retired," a senior home ministry official told Mumbai Mirror. "We've 
asked the prisons department to train more for future jobs. It's a laborious 
process."

Maharashtra has executed 19 convicts since independence, with a marked lull 
between August 26, 1995 when Sudhakar Joshi, convicted of robbery and triple 
murder, was executed at Pune's Yerawada Jail, and Kasab's hanging.

The home ministry official said the department had to "exercise a lot of 
caution during Kasab's hanging as the executioner hadn't carried out a death 
sentence for a very long time". The state had transferred those officers who 
supervised the 26/11 terrorist's hanging at Yerawada Jail to Nagpur so that 
Memon's sentence could be carried out without trouble.

Senior superintendent of jails Yogesh Desai, who served in Yerwada, is now the 
senior superintendent of Nagpur Jail and Meeran Borwankar continues to hold the 
position of additional director of police (prisons). Both witnessed Kasab's 
hanging and were acquainted with the procedure. However, the act of executing 
condemned prisoners lies in the ambit of just one man's expertise, which led 
the home ministry to issue the directive seeking an increase in the number of 
executioners.

2 of Maharashtra's jails are equipped for hanging convicts - Nagpur and Pune, 
while those at Dhule and Thane hold such facilities, but aren't operational.

Anup Surendranath, of the Death Penalty Research Project, who resigned as the 
deputy registrar of the Supreme Court following Memon's hanging, said the 
government should be joining the debate on how death penalty is administered in 
the country instead of sending out the message that it is in favour of capital 
punishment by training constables to serve as hangmen. "Even during the Yakub 
Memon process, the mood was very much in favour of death penalty," he said. 
"But there are serious issues in terms of how we administer the death penalty. 
When a body like the Law Commission is seized of this issue, they should be 
joining the debate. This (training hangmen) will only send a message that we 
are going to hang more people in the near future. Now is not the time to say we 
are preparing to hang more people."

Maharashtra has 41 people on death row, including 2 women. While some of them 
have been sentenced by lower courts and are awaiting appeals and mercy pleas, a 
few have expended all forms of judicial recourse. Among these are Renuka Kiran 
Shinde and Seema Mohan Gavit, known as the Gavit sisters, and the Shakti Mill 
rapists.

The sisters were convicted of kidnapping 13 children below the age of 5 and 
murdering at least 5. The president rejected their mercy plea in April 2014, 
but they approached the Bombay High Court in August 2014, citing "delay in 
execution", after the Supreme Court commuted a few sentences citing this 
reason. The HC has stayed their execution.

The other prominent death row inmates are 3 men found guilty in the 2013 Shakti 
Mills gang rape case - they have appealed the sentence; Shivaji Shankar Alhat 
sentenced to death in 2003 for kidnapping and raping a minor over 20 times 
before strangling her to death in Junnar; and Rajendra Pralhadrao Wasnik, for 
raping and murdering a 3-year-old in March 2007.

(source: Mumbai Mirror)






ENGLAND:

Death penalty: execution ballads were the news reports and tweets of a bloody 
era


Whether it's the recent mass death sentences handed down by the Egyptian 
judiciary after the ill-fated Arab Spring uprising, or US states having to 
delay executions of death row prisoners because European drug companies are 
refusing to supply them with the drugs required, capital punishment regularly 
dominates the news headlines.

Central to all of these stories is the publicity they receive. If you're going 
to practice capital punishment as a deterrent - a claim still made despite 
statistics having shown that the death penalty has no effect on crime rates - 
then there's no point doing it unless as many people as possible can find out 
about it. Now such information zips around the world on the internet. But how 
did people find out about crime and punishment in that era of spectacular 
public executions, the Renaissance?

In the early modern period, the majority of the European population was 
illiterate, and so more creative ways of broadcasting the horror were needed. 
So news stories were regularly printed in song form, and sung publicly in 
streets, markets and fairs.

The dance of death

Ballads were often set to well-known tunes, increasing the likelihood of 
pricked ears and allowing anyone to instantly sing along. Rhythm, melody, and 
rhyme allowed songs to be more easily memorised than a prose version of events 
and therefore more likely to be shared. Like news reporting today, crime and 
punishment fascinated audiences, and so execution ballads were the most popular 
sub-genre of news songs, offering details of the crimes and the often brutal 
and gory punishment of the criminal.

Take, for example, the ballad about the unfortunate Edward Coleman, a courtier 
under Charles II, who was executed for treason, having been implicated in a 
fabricated "Popish Plot" to murder the king. Set to the popular tune 
"Packington's Pound", one of its verses goes:

To the place of Destruction tencounter grim death,

And there by a Cord to resign half his breath:

His Bowels ripd out, in the flames to be cast,

His Members disseverd on Poles to be placd:

A sight full of horror, but yet its most just

That they shoud first bleed, that after blood thirst.

One might well ask why people would want to sing the graphic details of a 
person being hanged, chopped into pieces and burned. But the communal 
participation in the songs echoed the participation by spectators in the 
process of execution itself; the entire community was expected to be involved. 
Not only would crowds gather at the gallows, but spectators would gather all 
along the journey from the prison to the execution site to jeer at, pray for, 
and sing with the condemned.

Execution ballads are therefore almost universally conservative, preaching a 
highly moralising message of repentance. The condemned is always portrayed as 
guilty and their crimes are described in detail, often beginning with what one 
might call "gateway sins" - not going to church or gambling - which inevitably 
lead to more serious crimes like murder and treason. They go to their deaths 
wholly remorseful, begging God for mercy and, most importantly, warning 
spectators and listeners to learn from their mistakes and repent before it's 
too late.

Ventriloquism

This was done most powerfully through a conceit that many ballads use, which is 
to put the song in the first person voice of the condemned criminal. For a 
moment at least, the singer of the execution ballad could vicariously 
experience the emotions of a person in their last moments of life, and feel the 
fear and remorse that a victim of execution might feel. Judith Brown, a 
maidservant burned to death in 1684 for the murder of her mistress, sings at 
the end of her ballad:

In this devouring flame,

My life must now expire,

Alas my sins I needs must blame

I end my days in fire.

But the condemned didn't always come off so well. Catholic heretic John Felton 
isn't treated nearly so sympathetically in his 1570 ballad. This was set to a 
country dance tune, and ridiculed the quartering and display of his severed 
limbs on the gates of London:

His quarters stand not all together

But ye mai hap to ring them thether

In place where you wold have them be

Then might you doe as pleaseth ye.

For whye? they hang,

Unshryned each one upon a stang:

Thus standes, the case,

On London gates they have a place.

His head upon a pole

Stands wavering in ye wherling wynd

So songs about executed criminals could be plaintive, vengeful, or even 
mocking, but they always reminded their listeners and singers that sin would be 
violently punished. The spectacle of the scaffold was meant to instil fear into 
the hearts of the crowd, and compassion for the repentant criminal, who could 
act as a voice from the no man's land between life and death to warn of the 
dangers of sin and crime.

With their ability to be easily sung, memorised, and passed on, ballads were a 
perfect medium in the early modern period for telling the stories of those 
unfortunate souls who felt the wrath of the authorities. But remember, such 
things are far from consigned to history. Given the recent job advertisement by 
the Saudi Arabian government for 8 new executioners, these are stories that 
will continue to be told.

(source: The Conversation)