[Deathpenalty] death penalty news----worldwide

[Rick Halperin]

June 27




JAPAN:

Triple murder, 90, dies of suffocation as oldest prisoner on Japan's death row


A 90-year-old triple murderer, reportedly the oldest prisoner on death row, has 
choked to death on his own vomit at a prison in Fukuoka Prefecture, the 
government said Monday.

Takeshige Hamada was convicted of killing 3 people in the prefecture for 
insurance money over a 2-year period from 1978.

According to the government, he was not breathing when found lying on the floor 
of his cell around 12:50 a.m., and showed signs of vomiting.

He was rushed to a hospital but pronounced dead at around 2 a.m.

(source: Japan Times)






INDIA:

1993 Mumbai serial blasts case: Prosecution seeks death penalty for convict 
Mustafa Dossa


The prosecution on Tuesday argued that convict Mustafa Dossa be given the death 
penalty for his role in the 1993 Mumbai blasts. A special TADA court was 
hearing arguments on the quantum of sentence of punishment for the 6 convicts 
in the case.

Special CBI counsel Deepak Salvi, had said that he would seek extreme 
punishment for all the 6 convicts in the case. "While deciding on the 
punishment in this case, the court needs keep 2 numbers in mind ... that 257 
persons died in the blasts and nearly 713 citizens were brutally injured. These 
numbers are sufficient to display the brutality caused by the blasts. The men 
who caused the blast had brought 1500 kg of RDX (an explosive substance). It 
would have destroyed the entire city of Mumbai," Salvi had said in court on 
June 22.

The TADA court had convicted 6 people - Abu Salem, Mustafa Dossa, Feroz Abdul 
Rashid Khan, Taher Merchant, Karimulla Khan and Riyaz Siddiqui - in the case on 
June 16 and acquitted Abdul Qayyum Sheikh who was then released from Arthur 
Road jail on June 17.

The 12 successive explosions on March 12, 1993 in Mumbai, then Bombay, had 
rocked different places in the city between 1.30 pm and 3.40 pm.

(source: Indian Express)






UNITED KINGDOM/SOUTH AFRICA:

Lawyer who helped Nelson Mandela escape the death penalty


As the instructing solicitor for Nelson Mandela's defence team at the Rivonia 
trial of 1963-64, Joel Joffe, later Lord Joffe, who has died aged 85, played a 
key role in helping the future South African president and others avoid the 
death penalty. That was the severest sentence that could have resulted from 
being convicted of sabotage, and Mandela described Joffe as "the general behind 
the scenes in our defence".

Charges followed a police raid in July 1963 on Lilliesleaf Farm in the 
Johannesburg suburb of Rivonia, where Mandela and his anti-apartheid 
co-conspirators - including Govan Mbeki, Walter Sisulu, Lionel "Rusty" 
Bernstein, Andrew Mlangeni, Ahmed Kathrada and Dennis Goldberg - had been 
plotting the overthrow of the government. Mandela was already in jail for 
another offence and was indicted later.

At the time, Joffe, dispirited by the all-pervading power of apartheid, was 
winding down his business affairs in advance of emigrating to Australia. But 
when he was asked by Hilda Bernstein to defend her husband, and by Mandela's 
then wife, Winnie, to defend him, he put his emigration plans on hold and threw 
himself into the case, which came to the supreme court in Pretoria the 
following October.

As Mandela was set on pleading guilty and wanted the trial to inspire further 
resistance to apartheid, the strategy of the legal team, headed by the 
barrister and covert communist Bram Fischer, rested on trying to at least 
prevent the imposition of the death penalty. Initially Mandela had wanted to 
announce in his statement from the dock in April 1964 that he was prepared to 
die for his belief in a non-racial and democratic South Africa. However, Joffe, 
recognising Mandela's great potential as a statesman of the future, tried to 
dissuade him from such a course of action. "I could not bear the thought of 
Mandela being hanged and decided that on the re-typed version I would leave out 
the 'prepared to die' sentence," he said.

The next day he received a note from Mandela asking for the sentence to be 
restored, but with the addition of the words "if needs be" - a qualification 
that may have been crucial to the defendants' survival. Joffe later learned 
that the lawyer George Bizos and Mandela's eventual biographer Anthony Sampson 
had spent the previous evening persuading Mandela to agree to it.

After the trial, Joffe visited Mandela in jail on Robben Island and was told 
that there would be no appeal. With the case over and his profile raised 
immeasurably, he and his wife - Vanetta Pretorius, an artist, whom he had 
married in 1962 - had made many black friends but few white ones. In 1965 he 
resurrected his plans to settle in Australia, but when that country refused him 
access as an "undesirable", due mainly to his involvement with the Rivonia 
trial, he and Vanetta headed to the UK to make their new home.

Shortly after his arrival there Joffe teamed up with a colleague from his 
student days in Johannesburg, Mark Weinberg, and served as a director of Abbey 
Life Assurance (1965-70). With Sydney Lipworth, they transformed this into 
Hambro Life Assurance, later Allied Dunbar. The venture prospered, and during 
his 2 decades with it Joffe helped set up the charitable Allied Dunbar Trust, a 
pioneering corporate giving initiative which in particular supported projects 
to combat mental illness. He also became a leading philanthropist for 
UK-registered South African causes.

Joel was born in Johannesburg to Jewish immigrant parents who had met and 
married in South Africa. His father, Abraham Joffe, had come from Lithuania and 
his mother, Dena (nee Idelson), from what was then known as Palestine. After a 
Catholic boarding school, the Marist Brothers college, Joel studied law at the 
University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, qualified as a solicitor in 
1956 and 6 years later was called to the South African bar.

While working for a commercial law firm he built up a legal aid practice 
without the partners knowing, and when they objected to his pro bono work he 
moved to the more radical practice run by Harold Wolpe and his brother-in-law 
James Kantor. Wolpe was arrested shortly after the Rivonia raid, but escaped 
before he could be brought to trial and fled to Britain. The police then picked 
up Kantor under the same 90-day detention law. This meant that the 2 lawyers 
who could have been best placed to defend those arrested at Rivonia had been 
taken out of circulation - which is why Joffe was approached.

His book The Rivonia Trial (1995) was republished as The State vs Nelson 
Mandela: The Trial that Changed South Africa (2007). In January this year he 
gave a riveting account of what happened in the courtroom in a Memories of 
Mandela event at the British Museum that I chaired.

He served Oxfam in various capacitiies from 1980 to 2001, with 2 spells as 
chairman. Appointed a CBE in 1999, he was a guest on BBC Radio 4's Desert 
Island Discs in 2007.

After he was made a life peer in 2000, he tabled a private member's bill in 
2002 that sought to allow people to be given medical help to die under certain 
circumstances. The bill failed, but he re-introduced it in the Lords on several 
occasions. While it gained plenty of support in the public arena and stirred 
vigorous debate, it was never passed into law. He retired from the Lords in 
2015.

He is survived by Vanetta and their 3 daughters, Lisa, Abigail and Deborah.

-- Joel Goodman Joffe, Lord Joffe, lawyer and businessman, born 12 May 1932; 
died 18 June 2017

(source: The Guardian)