Feb. 26
PAKISTAN:
ATC awards death penalty to 4 TTP men
An anti-terrorism court (ATC) while announcing verdict in Ichhra police attack
case, handed death sentence to 4 terrorists linked with banned
Tehreek-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), ARY News reported.
During the hearing, public prosecutor said that the accused had attacked Ichhra
Police Training Center, where they killed 10 jail wardens from Khyber
Pakhtunkhwa who were under training at the center and injured 22.
He requested the court to award stern punishment to the accused.
On the other hand, counsels of the accused requested the ATC to acquit their
clients on the basis of insufficient evidence and absence of witnesses against
them.
However, the court after listening to both sides handed death sentence to four
accused namely Zulfikar, Karamat, Afzal and Abdul Hakim on 21 different counts.
All the 4 convicts were associated with TTP Punjab.
AFP adds: The convicts were also fined 1.8 million rupees (18,000 dollars)
each, he added.
Pakistan lifted a moratorium on executions in terror cases in December after
Taliban gunmen massacred more than 150 people at a school.
The executions could take decades to be carried out, however, because of the
lengthy appeals process allowed under Pakistani law.
The 4 TTP militants, all in their 20s, confessed to carrying out the attack on
the residential quarters for prison staff in the densely populated Lahore
suburb of Ichra, Saeed said.
After killing 10 during the dawn raid armed with Kalashnikov rifles and hand
grenades, they then stormed another building where around 30 police prison
officers were sleeping.
Many were injured as they fled into neighbouring houses in a bid to save
themselves from the volley of bullets, Saeed added.
The 4 men were arrested about a year after the attack when they were caught
with Kalashnikov rifles and hand grenades at a bus stand in Lahore.
Pakistan amended its constitution and set up military courts last month for
speedy trial of terrorism cases.
24 people have been executed since Prime Minister Sharif lifted a 6-year
moratorium on the death penalty in the wake of the December Taliban school
massacre in the northwestern city of Peshawar.
Heavily armed gunmen went from room to room at the army-run school killing 154
people, most of them children, in an attack that horrified the world.
(source: Ary News)
GLOBAL:
Fact check: No proof the death penalty prevents crime
With the fate of Australian drug smugglers Andrew Chan and Myuran Sukumaran
seemingly decided by the Indonesian legal system, Australian advocates for the
pair have been attempting to secure a reprieve through legal avenues and public
pressure.
During a visit to Bali in February, Victorian Supreme Court judge Lex Lasry
told ABC TV's 7.30 that the death penalty does not deter crime.
"There are all sorts of other punishments - life imprisonment and so on - but
the idea that a government would take individuals out into the bush, as they
would here, and shoot them is just something that I can never live with and
never understand, and apart from anything else, from a legal point of view,
no-one really claims now that it has any real deterrent value. It's just a
terrible thing to do," he said.
ABC Fact Check looks at the research.
The death penalty
More than 1/2 of all the nations in the world retain the death penalty in some
form or other. A small number retain it only for war-time offences and others
have not used it for over 10 years, but there are a large number that retain
and use the death penalty, predominately as a punishment for murder.
According to advocacy group Harm Reduction International, thirty-three nations
retain the death penalty for drug offences. Of those, not all carry out capital
punishment for these offences on a regular basis, and Harm Reduction
International estimates that "executions for drug offences have taken place in
only 12 to 14 countries over the [5 years to 2012]".
It lists 6 countries with a "high" rate of applying the death penalty in drugs
cases: China, Iran, Vietnam, Saudi Arabia, Singapore and Malaysia.
Oxford University professors Roger Hood and Carolyn Hoyle say Indonesia, which
resumed executions for drug traffickers in 2013, might soon be added to that
list "if it carries out its threat to execute more drug traffickers".
In the 5th edition of their book The Death Penalty: A Worldwide Perspective
released in January, Professors Hood and Hoyle write that Singapore, Malaysia
and possibly Vietnam may be "ready to be downgraded to 'low application
states'."
The United Nations has strict guidelines for the use of the death penalty,
restricting it to the "most serious crimes".
A resolution of the Economic and Security Council, first made in the 1980s,
endorsed by the UN General Assembly in December 1984, and updated in 1999 says
that "capital punishment may be imposed for only the most serious crimes, it
being understood that their scope should not go beyond intentional crimes with
lethal or other extremely grave consequences".
Since the adoption of this guideline, other UN bodies have made rulings about
how to interpret the "most serious crimes" provision, which exclude drug
offences. And the UN's Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial executions, Christof
Heyns, said recently that Indonesia was a signatory to the International
Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and its use of the death penalty for
drug offences was "in violation of international human rights standards".
A review of Indonesia's use of the death penalty and the Bali Nine case by
Colman Lynch, published in the Columbia Human Rights Law Review in 2009, says
capital punishment is also arguably against Indonesia's constitution.
Mr Lynch wrote that "though Indonesia had a legal obligation to abolish capital
punishment as a punishment for drug-trafficking crimes under its constitution
and applicable international law, as interpreted by relevant international
bodies, its judiciary was able to find sufficient ambiguity in the wording of
each obligation to buck the international trend of abolishing capital
punishment".
The death penalty in the United States
Fact Check asked Justice Lasry whether he had any particular research in mind
when he said the death penalty wasn't a deterrent. A spokeswoman for the
Victorian Supreme Court said that the judge's comments were based on "a general
body of research that indicates the death penalty has no real deterrent value".
In their book, Professors Hood and Hoyle say almost all the academic studies
available for review are concerned with the deterrent effect of capital
punishment on the rate of murder in the United States.
The authors say theoretical and methodological issues have "dogged the attempts
to prove or disprove the existence of the deterrent effect of executions in the
United States" and "a fierce controversy continues" in the United States over
attempts to use econometric models to address the question.
After reviewing the literature they conclude that "it is not prudent to accept
the hypothesis that capital punishment, as practised in the United States,
deters murder to a marginally greater extent than does the threat and
application of the supposedly lesser punishment of life imprisonment".
A comprehensive review of the research in this area over 34 years was conducted
in 2012 by a committee of the American National Academy of Sciences National
Review Council. The committee concluded that "research to date on the effect of
capital punishment on homicide is not informative about whether capital
punishment decreases, increases, or has no effect on homicide rates".
It said the studies it reviewed should not be used to influence policymakers.
"Claims that research demonstrates that capital punishment decreases or
increases the homicide rate by a specified amount or has no effect on the
homicide rate should not influence policy judgments about capital punishment,"
it said.
One of the main problems was that it was impossible to know what a
jurisdiction's murder rate would be with different sentencing options. "The
data alone cannot reveal what the homicide rate in a state without (with) a
capital punishment regime would have been had the state (not) had such a
regime."
A 2nd problem was "the use of incomplete or implausible models of potential
murderers' perceptions of and response to the capital punishment component of a
sanction regime".
Without this basic information, "it is impossible to draw credible findings
about the effect of the death penalty on homicide".
Expert opinion
While that review found the evidence was inconclusive, Jeffrey Fagan, a
professor of law at Columbia University in the US, told Fact Check he believed
that there was no evidence that showed the death penalty deterred.
Professor Fagan, who appeared as an expert witness for Mr Chan and Mr Sukumaran
in an unsuccessful appeal in 2007, said there was "no credible scientific
evidence that the death penalty deters criminal behaviour".
"Even when executions are frequent and well-publicised, there are no observable
changes in crime. Executions serve only to satisfy the urge for vengeance. Any
retributive value is short-lived, lasting only until the next crime."
His position is shared by the majority of criminologists in relation to
homicide, according to a 2009 survey of members of the American Criminology
Society, who were asked to limit their answers to their understanding of the
empirical research and to exclude their personal opinions.
That study found that over 88 % of the criminologists did not believe the death
penalty deterred murderers.
"In short, the consensus among criminologists is that the death penalty does
not add any significant deterrent effect above that of long-term imprisonment,"
the study said.
Professor Franklin Zimring of the University of California, Berkley, told Fact
Check the evidence wasn't there to support the argument that the death penalty
acted as a deterrent to murder.
"The number of homicide studies over the past century is vast and there is no
consistent evidence of marginal deterrent effect," he said.
Murder, the death penalty and Asia
Professor Zimring, with Professor Fagan and David T. Johnson of The University
of Hawaii, conducted a study that compared Singapore - a country that does have
the death penalty - with Hong Kong.
According to the study, in the mid 1990s, Singapore's execution rate was among
the highest in the world. There was a steep drop off in the decade after 1997 -
a reduction of an estimated 95 %.
Hong Kong abolished the death penalty in 1993.
The 3 concluded that "the Singapore experience magnifies the impact of American
assertions [that the death penalty deters] to a patently silly status".
They found that "homicide levels and trends are remarkably similar in these 2
cities over the 35 years after 1973, with neither the surge in Singapore's
executions nor the more recent steep drop producing any differential impact".
South Africa
In South Africa, the Constitutional Court considered the issue in 1995, and in
a judgement that struck out use of the death penalty, said:
"We would be deluding ourselves if we were to believe that the execution of the
few persons sentenced to death during this period, and of a comparatively few
other people each year from now onwards will provide the solution to the
unacceptably high rate of crime. There will always be unstable, desperate, and
pathological people for whom the risk of arrest and imprisonment provides no
deterrent, but there is nothing to show that a decision to carry out the death
sentence would have any impact on the behaviour of such people, or that there
will be more of them if imprisonment is the only sanction."
The court rejected the argument of the Attorney General that the death penalty
was a powerful deterrent.
The death penalty and drug offences
When it comes to assessing deterrence in relation to drug-related crime, Harm
Reduction International says finding reliable ways to measure the impact of
executions is a big challenge for researchers.
"A plethora of indicators could be used to consider deterrence with drugs," it
says in its 2012 global review of the death penalty for drug offences.
"Might it be arrests for drug offences? Representation of drug offenders in the
prison population? Hospital admissions for drug-related issues? Overdose
statistics (which can be brought down anyway with simple and cheap harm
reduction interventions)? Moreover, which drugs: marijuana, cocaine, heroin,
so-called 'party drugs' like ecstasy? Would a reduction in arrests for
marijuana represent a successful indicator for all drugs?
"Trying to prove or disprove the deterrent value of drug laws is
extraordinarily difficult. Anecdotally, one could say harsh drug laws do not
work. For example, Iran has some of the toughest drug laws in the world and a
high prevalence of injection drug use. Sweden does not have the death penalty
and it has comparatively low rates of problematic drug use."
In their book, Professors Hood and Hoyle agree that producing evidence is
difficult. They write that in all 33 countries with the death penalty for drug
offences, "it has been argued that the death penalty is an indisputable
deterrent to drug trafficking, but no evidence of a statistical kind has been
forthcoming to support this contention".
What's more they say it is unlikely that any such evidence could be gathered.
"The low rates of effectiveness of law enforcement, the relative immunity from
the law of those who profit most from the trade in drugs, and the higher risks
of violence and death they most probably run from others engaged in the drugs
trade, all make it seem implausible that the death penalty in itself will have
a marginally stronger deterrent effect than long terms of imprisonment,
especially when ... only 11 of 33 countries with power to execute offenders for
drugs offences have actually done so within the past 10 years."
In Mr Lynch's 2009 review of Indonesia's use of the death penalty and the Bali
9 case, he quotes Professor Fagan's expert testimony used in an attempt to
appeal the death sentences for Mr Chan and Mr Sukumaran on a human rights
basis.
Professor Fagan "described extensive studies showing that criminals are
deterred more by an increase in their likelihood of apprehension than by an
increase in the magnitude of their punishment, meaning that likely capture is a
more effective deterrent than potential death," Mr Lynch wrote.
Professor Fagan argued that the comparative drug crime rates in Singapore and
Indonesia, when compared with death sentences handed down showed that there was
no deterrent effect.
"If capital punishment had a deterrent effect on drug trafficking, this would
lead to less drug trafficking, and therefore higher wholesale drug prices, in
Singapore. However, wholesale drug prices for both cocaine and heroin were
significantly higher in Indonesia than in Singapore from 2003 to 2006, and
drugs generally were more prevalent in Singapore than Indonesia in that period,
indicating that drug trafficking was not deterred as a result of Singapore's
high levels of capital punishment," the article says.
Mr Lynch wrote that a typical factor in drug-trafficking cases is the potential
for large monetary gains, for which a trafficker might be prepared to risk even
the death penalty. He quoted research discussing "the overwhelming effect of
drug smugglers' potential financial gains, including one smuggler's comment
that 'the money overrode any - any rational judgment'."
The verdict
There is scant research on whether the death penalty deters drug trafficking.
Experts who have considered the issue of the death penalty as a punishment for
murder, and in some cases drug offences, around the world, say there is not
enough evidence to conclude that the death penalty deters.
Justice Lasry's claim that it has no real deterrent value is well founded.
(source: radioaustralia.net)
IRAN:
Hundreds support Iranian mystic facing death sentence----Taheri was nearly done
with his prison sentence when the court changed the charge to one that carries
the death penalty.
A man who taught mysticism in Iran faces the death penalty after already
serving almost 4 years in prison, in a case that has sparked outrage among
hundreds of supporters.
Mohammad Ali Taheri, founder of a popular spiritual group called "Erfan-e
Halgheh," or "mysticism circle," has been kept in solitary confinement in
Tehran's notorious Evin prison since May, 2011. Taheri, who taught popular
spirituality and meditation classes, was originally given a 5-year sentence for
"insulting Islamic sanctities," an offense that does not carry the death
penalty as it does not involve the deliberate insulting of the Prophet
Mohammad.
But with just a year left in his sentence, authorities have changed the charges
to "corruption on Earth," which can potentially lead to a death sentence,
according to his family. Yesterday, Taheri's wife, daughter and brother
attended a court hearing, when they were told to come back after the Iranian
New Year, celebrated March 21, family members told FoxNews.com.
Hundreds of supporters gathered in protest outside the courthouse, prompting
authorities to use tear gas and arrest more than 70, according to Taghato News.
Taheri has endured a dozen hunger strikes while in solitary confinement and
attempted suicide four times, according to supporters.
His internal organs are now failing, according to his wife.
If he is executed, he will be just 1 of more than 1,200 prisoners executed
since President Hassan Rouhani took office in August of 2013.
Iran has about 220,000 prisoners, in a country with a total population of about
75 million, according to Gholamhossein Esmaili, Iran's chief prison official.
Taheri's teachings include belief that every human being deserves love, respect
and equality before God and treating others as you would want to be treated. He
also practiced a form of healing and relaxation through meditation.
"The government wants to call him a cult leader because his teachings go
against what they want us to hear," said Anita Ghanaei, a student of Taheri's
course. "The Iranian government has created an environment where people are in
duress, and once a person is in duress it is easier to hate than love."
Taheri has been denied access to his lawyer, according to his family.
The case may go beyond that of Iranian authorities cracking down on a spiritual
leader, according to Ghanaei, who says Taheri was arrested when a man, whose
wife left him, blamed Taheri's teachings.
In July 2014, Taheri sent a letter to Ahmed Shaheed, the United Nations
Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in Iran, detailing the abuses and
torture he has endured.
(source: Fox News)
INDONESIA:
19 E. Java Workers Face Death Penalty in Saudi Arabia, Malaysia
19 migrant workers from East Java are facing the death penalty in Saudi Arabia
and Malaysia, according to the province's Human Resources and Civil
Registration Agency.
Thousands of other migrant workers from East Java are being prosecuted for
breaking the law abroad, the agency was reported as saying on Wednesday. Their
alleged offenses range from lack of proper documentations and getting caught
after entering the country illegally, to involvement in drug abuse.
"We seek assistance from the Foreign Affairs Ministry," Edi Purwinarto, the
head of the East Java Human Resources and Civil Registration Agency, told
newsportal Tempo.co on Wednesday.
Nusron Wahid, the head of the Agency for the Placement and Protection of
Indonesian Migrant Workers (BNP2TKI), said that there was a total of 229
migrant workers facing the death penalty and 38 of them had been convicted
already.
"They, including the 19 migrant workers from East Java, are filing appeals,"
Nusron said.
The Indonesian government, which is facing international criticism over
imminent execution of 11 foreign and local drug convicts, is providing legal
assistance for the convicted migrant workers and is seeking to discuss the
ongoing issue with Saudi Arabia and Malaysia.
(source: The Jakarta Globe)
******************
Bali 9: Indonesian leader considering death penalty stance, says Abbott ----
Australian prime minister says he thinks Joko Widodo is 'carefully considering
Indonesia's position' following conversation
Indonesia is "carefully considering" its position in relation to the execution
of the Bali 9 ringleaders following a conversation between Tony Abbott and the
Indonesian president, Joko Widodo, the Australian prime minister has said.
Abbott spoke to his Indonesian counterpart overnight to plead for clemency for
the Australian drug traffickers Andrew Chan and Myuran Sukumaran.
"It was a positive sign that the conversation took place," Abbott said on
Thursday morning.
"I don't think it would help the case of these 2 young Australians if I was to
start ventilating in public the contents of the conversation. Suffice to say
that the president absolutely understands our position ... and I think he is
carefully considering Indonesia's position," he said.
"I don't want to raise hope that might turn out to be dashed. I don't want to
reflect on Indonesia or my friend president Joko Widodo. I want to ensure that
as far as is humanly possible, I am speaking out for Australians and for
Australian values. But I also have to respect and defend Australia's
friendships. One of the very best of our friendships is that with Indonesia,"
Abbott said.
Abbott called on Widodo to spare the duo's lives, pointing to their
rehabilitation while in Bali's Kerobokan jail.
It is understood Abbott expressed Australia's hope that Indonesia would show
mercy to Chan and Sukumaran.
The leader of opposition business, Tony Burke, told Sky News that Labor and the
Coalition "stand together" in efforts to save Chan and Sukumaran.
"There's been complete bipartisanship and support in the way the government has
been trying to seek clemency here," Burke said.
The pair, who were caught trying to smuggle heroin into Indonesia in 2005 as
part of the Bali 9 drug ring, are expected to be transferred in preparation for
their execution after a last-ditch legal plea for clemency failed.
The ABC reported that leaders from France, Brazil and the Netherlands have
called Widodo in relation to their citizens who are also facing the firing
squad.
Bilateral relations have been strained since Abbott asked Indonesia to
reciprocate for Australia's aid contribution following the 2004 Boxing Day
tsunami by sparing Chan and Sukumaran.
As part of a widespread backlash to Abbott's comments, Aceh residents began a
social media campaign to repay the aid.
(source: The Guardian)
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