Dec. 12
INDIA:
Death penalty in India has no clear guidelines, new research reveals----Capital
punishment is considered a deterrent by some, but judges have little guidance
for deciding what can merit such a sentence
The death-penalty sentencing process in India is broken, and now there is fresh
research that reiterates this fact. In pathbreaking work carried out by the
National Law University in Delhi, 43 of 60 former judges of India???s Supreme
Court interviewed for the research, who had adjudicated 208 death-penalty cases
among them between 1975 and 2016, expressed grave doubts about wrongful
convictions.
But 39 of the judges interviewed favor retaining capital punishment. 8 of them
were former chief justices of India. Of the 60 judges interviewed, 47
adjudicated capital-punishment cases and confirmed 92 death sentences in 63
cases.
Judges of the apex court are regarded as the embodiment of the letter and
spirit of the law, and are supposed to judge with objectivity, without letting
their biases and prejudices creep into rulings. The death sentences confirmed
by the Supreme Court are final decisions, unless they are reversed on review,
which happens very rarely.
However, the report throws up a grave fact - that there is a lot of
subjectivity in the nature of judgments. Many judges don't have clarity about
the the legal statutes behind the sentencing procedure.
The report, which is in the form of an opinion study, kept the views of
individual judges anonymous so as not to divert focus from the system to
specific persons.
Justification for torture
The rampant use of torture, the study found, shows how deep the crisis in the
criminal justice system is. Torture is used to generate evidence as well as to
fabricate it. Though some former judges did offer justifications for this
abysmal state of affairs, there was an overwhelming sense of concern about the
integrity of the criminal justice system from multiple perspectives.
Of the 39 judges, only one thought torture by the police and other
investigative agencies was not perpetrated. Of the rest who accepted that
torture does take place, 12 thought it could be justified, given the pressures
investigators are working under. The existence of torture was also rationalized
by stating that investigating agencies are "either lazy, or don't have enough
manpower, or do not know methods of scientific investigation," the report says.
The judges voiced their concerns, but it had little bearing on their views on
the administration of capital punishment.
Judge-centric sentencing
In 1980, a 5-judge bench of the Supreme Court, in the Bachan Singh vs State of
Punjab case, laid down a binding doctrine on how death sentences are to be
handed down. It was to be only in the "rarest of rare" cases, and the
principles for determining this sought to take away the subjectivity caused by
prejudices and views of individual judges.
However, the report reveals a shocking detail. Only 13 of the interviewed
judges were able to articulate their views on how this doctrine was to be
implemented.
One judge who confirmed a death sentence that led to an execution expressed
helplessness about the subjectivity in sentencing: "The problem is so rampant,
so obvious, that it is difficult to find any consistency in the approach, and
it is difficult to see [the] rationale in awarding [the] death sentence in one
case and not awarding in another, more severe case."
The report states: "For a significant number of judges, the 'rarest of the
rare' was based on categories or description of offenses alone and had little
to do with judicial test requiring that the alternative of life imprisonment be
'unquestionably foreclosed.' This meant that for certain crimes, this widely
hailed formulation falls apart, rendering the sentencing exercise nugatory."
There is a growing consensus among criminologists that executions do not deter
criminals. Despite this, deterrence emerged as the strongest justification for
retaining the death penalty, with 23 former judges seeing merit in that
argument. When former judges spoke of the deterrent value of the death penalty,
significant differences emerged in their understanding of it.
The 1st of the 2 main strands that emerged viewed the fear of death for
achieving deterrence. Judges in this category took the position that the
qualitative nature of the death penalty distinguished it from any other
punishment, and that the fear of death was an effective deterrent. A judge who
has confirmed three death sentences in his 4-year tenure as a Supreme Court
judge remarked: "What is the greatest fear of every human being? ... Death.
Everything else you can swallow, but death you cannot."
Most of the judges felt that since there are very few executions, retaining
capital punishment is justified. This, the researchers of the report regretted,
did not factor in the intense mental agony and torture undergone by a person
living with the threat of the gallows hanging like the sword of Damocles over
his head for years on end.
In 2008, Amnesty International came out with a report that described the
administration of the death penalty in India as a "lethal lottery" and made a
strong point for its abolition in its entirety. The present report only
buttresses this argument.
(source: Asia Times)
*****************************
In Tamil Nadu Man's Public Killing On Camera, Father-In-Law Gets
Death----Engineering student V Sankar was hacked to death at a market in Tamil
Nadu's Tirupur in March last year. His wife, 19-year-old Kausalya, who was
accompanying him, was also attacked by the bike-borne men, who had been hired
by her parents
6 people have been given death penalty for the daylight murder of V Sankar --
the 23-year-old Dalit engineering student who married an upper caste woman --
which took place in March last year. Sankar was hacked to death at a market in
Tamil Nadu's Tirupur. His wife, 19-year-old Kausalya, who was accompanying him,
was also attacked by the bike-borne men, who had been hired by her parents. The
gruesome murder, captured on local CCTV cameras, had shocked the nation.
Kausalya's father Chinnasamy and the 5 men who carried out the attack have been
given death sentence. 2 others have been convicted as well. Annalakshmi,
Kousalya's mother, her uncle Pandithurai and a college student, Prasanna, have
been acquitted for want of evidence. Kausalya has welcomed the death sentence
and said she could appeal against the acquittals.
The family, which belongs to the politically powerful Thevar caste, was
allegedly unhappy with their marriage.
Sankar, a 3rd year student of engineering, and Kausalya had been married for
around 8 months when the attack took place.
In the CCTV footage obtained from the market, they are seen walking and
chatting when three men on a bike stop behind them and suddenly attack Sankar
with sharp weapons. When the man stopped moving, they turn on his wife and
slash at her till she collapses. The attackers then go away, apparently without
any worry about being recognized.
Sankar had died in the hospital from excessive bleeding. Kausalya took a long
time to recover. She now lives with Sankar's family, who are farmers.
It was the 3rd such incident in Tamil Nadu in 5 years.
(source: ndtv.com)
IRAN:
Upholding academic's death sentence in secret shows utter contempt for right to
life
The Iranian Supreme Court has run roughshod over the rule of law by upholding
the death sentence of Ahmadreza Djalali, an Iranian-born Swedish resident and
specialist in emergency medicine, through a secret and hasty process and
without allowing any defence submission, Amnesty International revealed today.
Ahmadreza Djalali's lawyers learned on Saturday 9 December that Branch 1 of the
Supreme Court had considered and upheld his death sentence in a summary manner
without granting them an opportunity to file their defence submissions.
"This is not only a shocking assault on the right to a fair trial but is also
in utter disregard for Ahmadreza Djalali's right to life. It is appalling that
the Iranian authorities have deliberately denied Ahmadreza Djalali the right to
a meaningful review of his conviction and sentence," said Magdalena Mughrabi,
Amnesty International's Deputy Director for the Middle East and North Africa.
"The Iranian authorities must immediately quash Ahmadreza Djalali's death
sentence, and grant him the right to present a meaningful appeal against his
conviction before the highest court. Failing to do so will be an irreversible
injustice."
Since early November, Ahmadreza Djalali's lawyers had repeatedly contacted the
Supreme Court to find out which branch his appeal petition had been allocated
so they could present their submissions.
The established practice in Iran is for lawyers to be informed of the branch
where the appeal will be considered before submitting the relevant
documentation and arguments. Ahmadreza Djalali's lawyers said they were
consistently told by court clerks that the case had not yet been allocated for
consideration and that they should wait. As a result, the sudden news of the
Supreme Court's decision came as a shock.
Ahmadreza Djalali, was on a business trip to Iran when he was arrested in April
2016. He was held in Evin prison by Ministry of Intelligence officials for
seven months, 3 of them in solitary confinement. He has said that during this
period he did not have access to a lawyer and was subjected to torture and
other ill-treatment to "confess" to being a spy.
No investigation into his allegations of torture and other ill-treatment is
known to have taken place.
In October 2017, he was convicted of "spreading corruption on earth" for spying
and sentenced to death after a grossly unfair trial. His lawyers have said that
the trial court relied primarily on evidence obtained under duress and produced
no evidence to substantiate the allegation that he was anything other than an
academic peacefully pursuing his profession.
In a letter written from inside Tehran's Evin prison in August 2017, Ahmadreza
Djalali said he was held solely in reprisal for his refusal to use his
scholastic and work ties in European academic and other institutions to spy for
Iran.
International human rights bodies have consistently held that it is a violation
of the right to life to pass a death sentence after criminal proceedings that
violate fair trial guarantees. Moreover, under international law, the only
category of crimes for which the death penalty may be allowed is "the most
serious crimes", which, as interpreted by international bodies, means only
crimes involving intentional killing.
Amnesty International opposes the death penalty in all cases without exception
regardless of the nature of the crime, the characteristics of the offender, or
the method used by the state to kill the prisoner. The death penalty is a
violation of the right to life and the ultimate cruel, inhuman and degrading
punishment.
(source: Amnesty International)
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