[Deathpenalty] death penalty news----worldwide

[Rick Halperin]

July 26



INDIA:

Must teach lesson to those who stand with enemies of humanity': Ramdev


Yoga Guru Baba Ramdev on Sunday said that along with hanging the traitors, it 
is equally important to teach a lesson to the supporters of those who are 
against humanity and nation.

"Hanging traitors is important, but it is also important to teach a lesson to 
all those who stand with the enemies of humanity and nation," he said.

Ramdev's reaction come after Bollywood actor Salman Khan in a controversial 
tweet said that Yakub Memon should not be hanged as the real culprit is the 
latter's brother Tiger Memon.

Yakub Memon has been sentenced to death for his role in the 1993 Mumbai blasts.

The Supreme Court had earlier this week rejected his last-minute appeal and 
upheld his hanging for July 30.

Yakub had challenged the apex court's order arguing that legal procedure was 
overlooked in awarding him death penalty. He said that the special TADA 
(Terrorists and Disruptive Activities (Prevention) court, which ordered him 
death warrant in 2007, did so before he could exhaust all his legal options.

(source: webindia123.com)

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

To Hang or Not to Hang


As a rule, I have tended to desist commenting on any controversy that surrounds 
an impending death penalty. My position as a social activist against capital 
punishment goes back more than four decades. On a personal level,it often 
placed me in embarrassing positions-my late father, a senior judicial figure 
who had actually pronounced the judgement in the landmark Kotra murder case, 
firmly believed that a proven case of 1st degree murder merited no mercy and 
there were occasions when I had to campaign against his judgements.

Needless to say that this penchant often lead to charges of being 'chicken 
hearted'; unfairly in my view! I genuinely believed and still maintain that 
death penalty by itself does not lead to an enhancement of collective 
satisfaction within the society. Even when statistics are touted to prove that 
crime figures in Saudi Arabia are much lower than most of the European 
countries, I tend to argue that the satisfaction quotient in the Western 
European countries is higher without even indulging in a debate on whether 
these comparisions are valid given the contextual dissonance between the 2 
societies.It must also be remembered that in the United States, the provinces 
which have abolished the death penalty have consistently shown lower crime 
figures than the ones that still retain it.

However I have accepted the position that as long as the highest court in the 
lands believes that capital punishment is a valid and legal constitutional 
provision, it can be exercised and it is a matter of some solace to note that 
the Court has ruled that it should be pronounced only in the rarest of rare 
cases which has resulted in a dramatic fall in the instnces where the sentence 
is carried out.

Let me state at the outset that I am revolted at what Yaqub Memon has done! The 
Supreme Court has found him guilty and I would much rather go by its version 
rather than the version put forward by the parties with vested interests. While 
Asaduddin Owaisi seems to harbour a perverse belief that a non-Muslim is 
inherently opposed to any meting out of justice to Muslims,there are others who 
covertly or overtly harbour alarming antipathy towards Muslims which exceeds 
any humanitarian threshold and allows them to enter the most pernicious 
stereotypes. We can expect a reaction from them to Owaisi in very near future.

I would tend to ignore these ill-informed and motivated rantings and treat them 
with contempt that they rightfully deserve. My opposition in this particular 
case perhaps may have been motivated by my opposition to capital punishment but 
it mainly on an issue that is far more fundamental i.e. the sanctity of the 
commitment made by the government officials on behalf of the state.

There have been suggestions that Memon actually surrendered and that a 
commitment was given to him that he would be dealt with leniently if he 
cooperated with the law enforcers in India. The late B.Raman was an 
intelligence officer of repute and an arch nationalist. His letter which has 
just been revealed by the rediff.com makes some very pointed statements. Madhu 
Trehan, the current Editor of Newslaundry ( a portal where until recently I 
penned columns) who was the only journalist to have interviewed Memon, in a 
recent interview w, described Memon as someone who was not believable but 
admitted that she came back not being very sure whether he had actually 
surrendered or was nabbed the the police. If he had indeed voluntarily 
surrendered, then it is reasonable to entertain an iota of doubt that there had 
been some plea bargaining in the process. Raman is on the mark when he states 
that one of the prices we have to pay for being a democracy is to honour the 
commitment the state makes even to a supremely undesirable person like Memon.

To the best of my knowledge, the government has not given a categorical 
assurance that such plea bargaining was not a part of any deal. Doubts have 
been sown in many minds including my own and for the sake of the credibility of 
the Indian justice system , a response from the Indian government is necessary.

There are those who have commented that an undertaking of this nature has never 
been given by India at any time. I would counter that by stating that they have 
forgotten history. In the early 1970's when the Chambal ravines were 
dangerously infested with the most murderous dacoits who had ,according to 
those times, unbelievably high bounties on their heads. Mohar Singh carried a 
bounty of Rupees 2 lacs ( the equivalent figure would be in crores today). It 
was another dacoit Madhosingh (carrying a bounty of Rupees 1.5 lacs) who 
approached Jayaprakash Narayan expressing a desire among his fellow criminal to 
surrender. JP made it plain that they would have to pay for their 
transgressions but gave them only one undertaking -that they would not be 
sentto gallows.

JP did not represent the state and was giving them this assurance purely in his 
personal capacity capacity of a person who carried some moral authority. The 
government of the day agreed. Vast number of dacoits voluntarily emerged from 
the Chambal ravines and laid down their weapons. They were taken into custody 
and tried. But as the state had given an undertaking, not a single one of them 
was sentenced to death.

My point in this adumbration is that there are precedents when death penalty 
has been withheld because of some state undertaking. The whole point is whether 
that was the case here. If so , much to many people's regret, we would have to 
settle for life imprisonment.

But again did this actually happen! We wait for an answer from the government!

(source: Ashok Jahnavi Prasad, The Citizen)





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

Hanging is the least inhuman form of execution: Apex court


The Supreme Court has a history of deliberating over the death penalty; but, 
irrespective of its musings on this extreme punishment whose constitutionality 
it, however, upheld, there has been an agreement among benches that hanging is 
the least inhuman form of execution.

The latest iteration of this declaration came in a 2014 verdict where a bench 
headed by former Chief Justice of India P Sathasivam declared that based on 
past decisions of the SC and "on the basis scientific evidence and opinions of 
eminent medical persons hanging is the least painful way of ending the life.''

CJI Sathasivam, had in March 2013 confirmed the death sentence given in 2007 by 
trial court to Yakub Memon, younger brother of absconding 1993 blast mastermind 
Tiger Memon, for being a blast conspirator under the anti terror activities 
law. In January 2014, Justice Sathasivam authored a verdict where he accepted 
earlier majority pronouncements that held hanging to as the "most humane'' mode 
of execution of the sentence. But he laid down guidelines requiring a post 
mortem to be done after the execution to know if the hanging was done properly 
without inflicting pain due to suffocation as that would be violative of 'due 
procedure'.

The criminal procedure code section 354(5) prescribes the method of hanging in 
India to execute capital punishment. The predilection using a noose as 
punishment had led activist SC judge V R Krishna Iyer to declare way back in 
1974 that life sentence should be the rule and death, an exception. Later after 
the landmark 25-year-old ruling held that death sentence be given in "rarest of 
rare'' cases, in 1983, the SC had, notwithstanding the criticism about 
inconsistencies in imposition of death sentence, had tackled the issue of how 
cruel and barbaric the system of its execution by ''hanging till death'' was. 
The majority ruling by then CJI Y V Chandrachud had held hanging to be a mode. 
''not relentless in its severity'' and ''does not violate right to life under 
Article 21''.

''Hanging consists of a mechanism which is easy to assemble. The preliminaries 
to the act of hanging are quick and simple and they are free from anything that 
would unnecessarily sharpen the poignancy of the prisoner's apprehension. The 
chances of an accident during ...can safely be excluded. The method is a quick 
and...eliminates the possibility of a lingering death.'' It said.

"At the moment of final impact when life becomes extinct, some physical pain 
would be implicit in the very process of the ebbing out of life. But, the act 
of hanging causes the least pain imaginable on account of the fact that death 
supervenes instantaneously,'' the 1983 judgment relied on in 2014 said. The 
system of hanging, as now used, avoids to the full extent the chances of 
strangulation which results on account of too short a drop or of decapitation 
which results on account of too long a drop. "The system is consistent with the 
obligation of the State to ensure that the process of execution is conducted 
with decency and decorum without involving degradation of brutality of any 
kind,'' the SC held.

The SC said, in the wake of assertions that there is a dearth of hangman in 
prisons, a PM is obligatory to find that the cause of death is dislocation of 
vertebrae, not strangulation. "Constitution permits the execution of death 
sentence only through procedure established by law and conducting a PM would 
ensure that this procedure is just, fair and reasonable,'' Justice Sathasivam 
had said last year.

BOX:

A 1962 UN report said: "Hanging remains the most frequent method in use". It 
lists over 25 countries of the world in which the method of hanging is used for 
executing the death sentence.

In the US, only hanging is an option only in two states, one of which is 
Washington; most states execute through lethal injections.

"Hanging does not operate now through suffocation, but by a `long drop', 
invented by Prof. Haughton of Dublin, which dislocates the vertebrae and is 
calculated to produce an instantaneous and painless death."

In 1983 the SC said: "Humaneness is the hall-mark of civilised laws. Therefore, 
torture, brutality, barbarity, humiliation and degradation of any kind is 
impermissible in the execution of any sentence. The process of hanging does not 
have any of these, directly, indirectly or incidentally.''

In a dissenting view, Justice P N Bhagwati who had also struck down the 
validity of death sentence due to the method of its execution, had held that, 
"The physical pain and suffering which the execution of the sentence of death 
involves is also no less cruel and inhuman. In India, the method of execution 
followed is hanging by the rope. Electrocution or application of lethal gas has 
not yet taken its place as in some of the western countries.''

WHAT SC said in 2014:

In the light of repeated arguments regarding dearth of experienced hangman in 
the country, post mortem after an execution must be obligatory. This is to find 
the cause of the death of the convict ; to know if it is by dislocation of the 
cervical vertebrate (as required) or by strangulation which results on account 
of too long a drop. Making post mortem obligatory will ensure just, fair and 
reasonable procedure of execution of death sentence.

(source: The Times of India)

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

72 Muslims Hanged in India against 1,342 Hindus and Others


If the Supreme Court rejects Yakub Memon's appeal to suspend his execution for 
his role in the 1993 Mumbai bomb blasts, he will take his last walk at 7 am on 
July 30 - to the gallows at Nagpur Central Jail. The bombings were meant to 
avenge the demolition of the Babri Masjid, which India???s liberal and secular 
establishment still condemn as an attack on the minorities. However, a new 
report by Death Penalty Research Project of the National Law University (NLU), 
Delhi shows that of the 1,414 prisoners in the available list of convicts 
hanged in post-Independence India, only 72 are Muslims - not even 5 % of the 
total executions. The report, however, clarifies its list is not meant to be a 
reference for the total number of prisoners hanged in India since 1947.

--Of the 27 prisoners hanged in Andhra Pradesh till 1968, only 2 were Muslims.

--Of the 25 hanged in Delhi, only 4 were Muslims.

--Of the 103 hanged in Haryana, there was only 1 Muslim.

--Of the 39 hanged in Karnataka, only 3 were Muslims.

--Of the 78 convicts hanged in Madhya Pradesh, only 5 were Muslims.

--Of the 56 hanged in Maharashtra, there were only 5 Muslims.

--Of the 366 prisoners who went to the gallows in UP, only 45 were Muslims.

--Of the 32 convicts who were hanged in West Bengal, only 7 were Muslims.

The death list in some states is tainted with gallows humour: in Kerala, no 
records are available because the authorities confessed termites ate them all. 
The story is similar in Andhra Pradesh, where termites have made a meal of all 
records pertaining to executions after 1968.

The report was compiled by NLU researchers from the responses received from 
India's Central jails. Certain prisons provided information for only a certain 
period of time, or like Tamil Nadu, refused to give any data. According the 
report, in Jammu and Kashmir, the playground of Islamist terror, not 1 Muslim 
has been hanged. Official statistics of terrorist killings in J&K are available 
only up to 2009, which note that over 47,000 people have died in terror-related 
violence. The up-to-date numbers would be higher. The Human Rights Watch has 
noted that thousands of Kashmiri Hindus have been killed over the past 10 years 
by terrorists and Muslim mobs. Additionally, in Haryana, Odisha, Rajasthan and 
Punjab, not a single Muslim convict has gone to the gallows. In India's 
capital, Delhi, Muslims comprise 11.7 % of the population, making it the 2nd 
largest community after Hindus. Here for every Muslim, 5 members of other 
communities climbed the scaffold. Executions are carried out in Jail No. 3, 
Tihar Jail.

Sections of the media and politicians such as Asaduddin Owaisi, leader of the 
Andhra Pradesh communal outfit, the All India Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen, and 
Abu Azmi, Samajwadi Party leader from Maharashtra, are protesting the death 
sentence. Owaisi accused the government of hanging Memon only because he is a 
Muslim and questioned why the death sentences of those convicted in Rajiv 
Gandhi's assassination case were commuted to life imprisonment. He had wanted 
Bangladeshi anti-fundamentalist author Tasleema Nasreen to be beheaded and had 
called MLAs kafirs and Hindus impotent. He was jailed for making hate speeches, 
but no harm came to him. In united Andhra Pradesh, his state, 27 convicts were 
hanged of which only 2 - Jonada Muslalaiah and Sk. Babu Sahib - were Muslims.

Azmi had accused the government "of making moves against Muslims". He claimed 
that according to the chargesheet, Memon was innocent. "He did run away with 
his brother but he has not committed any huge crime," said the Maharashtra 
legislator. In his own state - where there were 63 terror-related incidents 
this year alone, (around 9 a month) and 139 in 2014 (around 12 a month) - 56 
were hanged for various offences. Of these, only 4 Muslim convicts - Abdul 
Rehman Imrankhan, Abhasjhan Wazirkhan, Munwvar Haun Shah, and Ajmal Amir Kasab 
- climbed the scaffold, just 7.14 %. This amounts to 13 criminals of other 
faiths for every Muslim. Kasab was a Pakistani terrorist and part of an 
ISI-trained team, which killed 166 innocent people and wounded 293 in the 
bloody invasion of Mumbai in November 2008.

(source: New Indian Express)

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

Yakub Memon's death penalty sends message India is not soft on terror: 
BJP----The1993 blast victims have been waiting for so many years for this 
trial. There are the conspirators and there are the masterminds. We will get to 
the masterminds, but right now it's imperative that this conspirator is hung to 
death. So, it sends a message to the terrorists world over that India is not 
soft on terror, NC told ANI here.

Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leader Shaina NC on Sunday said that the death 
penalty for 1993 Bombay blasts accused Yakub Memon would send a message to the 
terrorists world over that India is not soft on terror.

She said that the victims of the blast have been waiting since long for this 
trial.

2 senior bureaucrats of Maharashtra had yesterday met Governor C. Vidyasagar 
Rao to discuss the mercy petition moved by Yakub Memon, who is to be executed 
on July 30.

Additional Chief Secretary (Home) K.P. Bakshi and Principal Secretary (Law and 
Judiciary) MA Sayeed had an hour-long meeting with the Governor in this regard.

Memon has been sentenced to death for his role in the 1993 Mumbai blasts.

The Supreme Court had earlier this week rejected his last-minute appeal and 
upheld his hanging for July 30.

Memon had challenged the apex court's order arguing that legal procedure was 
overlooked in awarding him death penalty. He said that the special TADA 
(Terrorists and Disruptive Activities (Prevention)) court, which ordered him 
death warrant in 2007, did so before he could exhaust all his legal options.

(source: DNA India)

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

CPI (M) opposes Yakub Memon's death penalty


The Communist Party of India (Marxist) on Sunday opposed the death penalty 
awarded to 1993 Bombay blasts convict Yakub Memon, saying that the latter had 
helped the Indian agencies.

"CPI (M) in principle opposes capital punishment to Yakub Memon and 
others...Yakub Memon helped Indian agencies, he should not be given capital 
punishment," CPI (M) general secretary Sitaram Yechury told ANI.

The CPI (M) leader's reacting came after Bollywood actor Salman Khan tweeted 
that Yakub Memon should not be hanged as the real culprit is the latter's 
brother Tiger Memon.

Meanwhile, a petition endorsed by eminent jurists, the Members of Parliament, 
leaders of political parties, eminent individuals from different walks of life 
has been submitted to President Pranab Mukherjee requesting him to consider the 
mercy plea against the execution of Yakub Memon's death sentence.

Yakub Memon has been sentenced to death for his role in the 1993 Mumbai blasts.

The Supreme Court had earlier this week rejected his last-minute appeal and 
upheld his hanging for July 30.

(source: ANI news)






AUSTRALIA:

Labor condemns Indonesian death penalty


Labor has formally condemned Indonesia's execution of Bali 9's Andrew Chan and 
Myuran Sukumaran.

The party's national conference on Sunday passed a resolution that "condemns 
these executions in the strongest possible terms" and commits a future Labor 
federal government to push for a global moratorium on the death penalty.

Drug smugglers Chan and Sukumaran were executed by firing squad in late April 
amid an outcry from Australia at Indonesia's continued use of the death 
penalty.

(source: news.com.au)






SAUDI ARABIA:

Death-row Indonesian maid 'nearing release'


The much-publicized case of Satinah binti Jumadi Ahmad, 41, an Indonesian maid 
jailed in Saudi Arabia since 2009 for killing her employer's wife and stealing 
money, could be nearing an end soon.

"Indonesian Embassy officials will visit Buraidah next week to check the status 
of the case," said Dede Achmad Rifai, an embassy official, here Saturday.

The maid is lodged in a jail in Buraidah. The Indonesian government has 
formally appealed to Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques King Salman to pardon 
her after it paid SR7 million in blood money to the victim's family. "The 
employer's family has already pardoned the maid, thus settling the private 
claims," said Rifai.

He, however, said that the public rights issue need to be settled before 
Satinah is finally set free.

The maid has been awaiting her death sentence since 2011 when she was found 
guilty of killing her employer's 70-year-old wife and stealing SR37,970 in 
2007.

The Indonesian government has fought a long battle to save the maid and had 
managed to get the execution delayed several times since her conviction.

Rifai said: "There are 18 workers, mainly housemaids, who have been awarded 
death penalty by various courts." This includes nine female workers in the 
Western Province alone for their alleged involvement in various crimes. The 
embassy has been trying to seek clemency in most of the cases.

In 1 case, according to a report published by Jakarta Post, an Indonesian daily 
newspaper, 5 Indonesian migrant workers sentenced to death in a murder case 
have been released by the court after receiving forgiveness from the victim's 
family.

The 5 workers have been identified as Saiful Mubarak, Samani Muhammad, Muhammad 
Mursyidi, Ahmad Zizi Hartati and Abdul Aziz Supiyani. Charges against these 5 
people were for killing a Saudi national, Zubair bin Hafiz Ghul Muhammad, in 
2006.

The Indonesian diplomatic missions in Riyadh and Jeddah are still trying to 
resolve several cases ranging from petty crimes to death penalty matters.

(source: Arab News)