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)
_______________________________________________
A service courtesy of Washburn University School of Law www.washburnlaw.edu
DeathPenalty mailing list
DeathPenalty@lists.washlaw.edu
http://lists.washlaw.edu/mailman/listinfo/deathpenalty
Unsubscribe: http://lists.washlaw.edu/mailman/options/deathpenalty
