July 14
CANADA/IRAN:
Canada refuses to help secure justice for murdered Toronto man
The man wanted for hacking a Toronto father to death last year with a machete
sits in an Iranian prison — but not for much longer.
Hair stylist Sepehr Yeganehfathollah, 26, fled back to his Iranian homeland
just hours after he allegedly killed construction worker Nader Fadaei at a
Yonge St. Tim Hortons south of Steeles Ave. in what the victim’s friends insist
was an unprovoked attack.
On the evening of Sept. 19, 2018, as on many evenings, Fadaei, 44, had gone to
have coffee with his friends.
But this time would be tragically different.
An altercation broke out in the parking lot at about 8 p.m. when Fadaei was
confronted by a man who accused him of insulting his mother.
According to witnesses, Yeganehfathollah’s mother had wrongly identified Fadaei
as someone who had done her wrong.
“It was a case of mistaken identity,” says Shawn, the family’s spokesman who is
too fearful to have his last name used.
“The last thing Nader said was ‘I don’t know your mother.’”
Fadaei, a father of two and sole breadwinner of the family, was first allegedly
punched by Yeganehfathollah.
When he threw his coffee to defend himself, his attacker drew a 72-cm machete
from his pants and slashed Fadaei from his shoulder through to his rib cage in
a gruesome blow.
He died shortly after arriving in hospital.
Before Toronto Police could put out a Canada-wide warrant for his arrest with a
warning that he was armed and dangerous, Yeganehfathollah was already on a
plane bound for Turkey and then Iran.
Toronto Police told them their hands were tied. They passed the information on
to Interpol, which issued a red notice for his arrest on charges of 1st-degree
murder.
This past February, a homicide officer contacted them with wonderful news:
Yeganehfathollah had been picked up in Iran.
Fadaei’s family and friends were thrilled. They believed justice was at hand.
They were wrong.
Yeganehfathollah was denying any part in Fadaei’s death. There’s no extradition
treaty with Iran, but authorities there were prepared to prosecute him if they
received the evidence gathered by Toronto Police, including the security video
that had captured the killing.
The homicide detectives were happy to hand it over, but this was above their
pay grade.
They’d have to get authorization from the attorney general — authorization that
was ultimately denied.
“I know that this situation is frustrating. We have been working many hours on
this case. We have really done everything possible at our level to secure some
form of justice for Nader and his family,” Det. Const. Charles Crangle wrote
Shawn in a March email.
“Please understand that the decision to send or not send documents and our
evidentiary files does not rest with us (police.) This decision rests with the
Attorney General and the Department of Justice. They decide on these types of
political matters.”
Shawn believes the Canadian government is refusing to send the evidence because
Yeganehfathollah could face the death penalty if convicted.
But Shawn insists that sentence would be commuted to life because the family
has agreed to accept compensation from him in return.
“His widow is in dire straits. She needs the money,” he explained.
But Canada appears to be more worried about an accused killer, Shawn argues.
“We have to save an alleged murderer who ran away from our justice system?
Canada wants to go the extra mile to save the life of an accused killer rather
than help a widow left with two kids?” he demands.
The family’s lawyer Rocco Achampong has just learned that Iranian police will
only hold Yeganehfathollah for one more week unless they receive the Toronto
evidence.
He can file a freedom of information request but that will take months.
“I don’t have that time. I need help to get these documents to Iran,” the
lawyer says.
“I need to send it as soon as possible to assist them in holding this man
accountable – or else an alleged killer is going to walk free and disappear.”
(source: Toronto Sun)
************************
Ex-Tehran mayor goes on trial over wife’s murder
The high-profile trial opened Saturday of a former Tehran mayor charged with
murdering his wife, Iranian media reported.
Prominent reformist Mohammad Ali Najafi appeared in a Tehran criminal court,
accused of shooting his second wife Mitra Ostad at their home in the Iranian
capital.
The charge sheet read out in court included murder, assault, battery and
illegal possession of a weapon.
The prosecutor also read out a statement from the former mayor, who claimed his
wife once threatened him with a knife during one of their frequent arguments.
Ostad’s body was found in the bathtub after Najafi turned himself in and
confessed to killing her on May 28, according to Iranian media.
Her family has appealed for the Islamic law of retribution to be applied -- an
“eye for an eye” form of punishment which would see the death penalty served in
this instance.
Najafi’s trial, which was adjourned until July 17, has drawn detailed coverage
in state media where scandals related to politicians rarely appear on
television.
A mathematician, professor and veteran politician, Najafi has previously served
as President Hassan Rouhani’s economic advisor and education minister.
He was elected Tehran mayor in August 2017, but resigned the following April
after facing criticism from conservatives for attending a dance performance by
schoolgirls.
Najafi married Ostad without divorcing his 1st wife, unusual in Iran where
polygamy is legal but socially frowned upon.
There have been calls by ultra-conservatives for Najafi to be tried without
favoritism from the judiciary, with some claiming the case shows reformists’
“moral bankruptcy”.
Reformists, meanwhile, have criticized the conservative-dominated television of
bias in their coverage and highlighting the case for political ends.
(source: alarabiya.net)
SINGAPORE:
Singapore denies targeting Malaysians for capital punishment
The Singapore government has dismissed a human rights lawyer’s claim that it
was targeting Malaysian prisoners for capital punishment, saying it applied the
republic’s laws “equally” to both local and foreign offenders.
“Regardless of nationality, all offenders, including prisoners sentenced to
death, are accorded full due process under the law,” Singapore’s home affairs
ministry said, the Straits Times reported.
The ministry went on to say that all foreigners in Singapore must abide by the
country’s laws and must be prepared for consequences if they chose to break
them.
Singapore, it noted, has a “strong rule of law and an independent judiciary”.
The ministry was responding to N Surendran, an adviser to rights group Lawyers
for Liberty, who wondered if the republic was preparing for an “execution
binge” in view of the number of clemency rejections which he described as
“unprecedented and shocking”.
These included the clemency petitions of 4 Malaysian prisoners.
The former Padang Serai MP also said that the number of simultaneous clemency
rejections raised questions as to whether each prisoner’s case was duly
considered by Singapore’s Cabinet and President Halimah Yacob.
But the home ministry, according to the Straits Times, said that each clemency
petition was considered carefully and that the president “acted on the advice
of the Cabinet” in accordance with its constitution.
? “The use of capital punishment is an issue that every country has the
sovereign right to decide for itself, taking into account its own
circumstances.
“There is no international consensus against the use of the death penalty when
it is imposed according to due process of law,” the daily reported the ministry
as saying.
Singapore, it added, respected the sovereign right of other countries to
determine their own legal systems and “expects the same in return.”
(source: Free Malaysia Today)
PAKISTAN:
BOOK EXCERPT----The death penalty law exploited by the British for oppression
is still being used in Pakistan----A new book examines how capital punishment
impacts some of the most vulnerable populations in the country.
The following is an excerpt from Justice Project Pakistan’s book, The Death
Penalty in Pakistan: A Critical Review, to be launched on July 11 in Islamabad.
A culmination of 10 years of Justice Project Pakistan’s work, the book
documents the many ways in which Pakistan’s application of the death penalty
intersects with legal, social and political realities.
It focuses on how capital punishment impacts some of the most vulnerable
populations: juveniles, the mentally ill, persons with physical disabilities,
low-wage migrant workers imprisoned in foreign jails and the working class.
Relying on public records for multiple Justice Project Pakistan clients
sentenced to death, nearly a decade of experience in the field, as well as
extensive experience with legislation and advocacy, this book tracks the many
junctures at which violations occur, from arrest to sentencing to execution.
As the Mughal Empire fell, the British took control and established the Indian
subcontinent as its colony until both Pakistan and India gained independence in
1947. Most of the laws and structures currently in place in Pakistan including
those related to criminal justice and the legal system date to colonial times.
While the British altered the modes of carrying out death sentences and made
hanging the norm, they also made it so that capital punishment was administered
more readily and frequently.
Whereas the Mughals did not have many formal prison systems, the building of
new and improved prisons marked the entry of the British into the Indian
subcontinent. In her book Prisoner Voices from Death Row, Reena Mary George
indicates, “Prisons continue to be located and structured more or less as they
were in colonial times. Any change that has been made has been incorporated
somewhat clumsily into the old system that basically served the triple colonial
aims of order, economy and efficiency”.
The first formal placing of capital punishment in the legal system, though,
came when the Governor-General of the India Council enacted the Indian Penal
Code in 1860. The law, drafted by a group of Britishers making up the Law
Commission, did not attempt to integrate any traditional Indian legal systems
and instead, as the historian David Skuy notes, “the entire codification
practice represented the transplantation of English law to India, complete with
lawyers and judges”.
Since English law at the time was not itself uniform, this was a first attempt
to create such a standard body of law. The current Code of Criminal Procedure
was introduced in 1898 but draws from the very first code of 1861 that followed
the 1857 Indian rebellion. Its intent was to control Indians. Some of the
provisions in these laws are termed as draconian or black laws.
In fact, these codes made the death penalty the automatic punishment for murder
with life imprisonment as the exception rather than vice versa. The primary
justification of the death penalty itself today stems from the time [the parts
that now constitute] Pakistan was still a colony, namely “the belief that
common people can be made to obey the law only through fear instilled by harsh
punishment”. This belief persists despite reputable empirical evidence to the
contrary and influences public opinion on the death penalty to this day.
The Death Penalty in Pakistan: A Critical Review
Along with increasing the number of convicts and prisons and instating harsh
laws, the British increased the number and frequency of executions in the
country significantly. In fact, by the 1920s, fearing that they were losing
their grip on the Empire, the British executed an average of three people every
day. According to one scholar, Anderson, “capital punishment was used
extensively in colonial India by the British Empire to control its colonial
subjects and reinforce its sovereignty”, particularly “given to the lower caste
and class”.
This discriminatory trend persists to this day such that a vast majority of
those on death row are from marginalised communities with poor socio-economic
backgrounds. Time and again, scholars indicate that executions helped
“consolidate imperial rule and eradicate resistance against it”. These often
took the form of public spectacles to dissuade dissenters and others from
rising up. One example is the blowing up of Indian soldiers by cannons for
mutiny.
These public displays, in fact, sometimes drew from the harsh means of
executions used by the Mughals before them. Other than these public spectacles,
hangings for common crimes from murder to theft to refusal to work were also
used to teach the colonised a lesson. While the actual number of executions was
roughly the same in Britain and India, the difference was that these deaths
were public and directly a way to assert dominance and repress insubordination
to curb challenges to the British Raj.
And though there are multiple cases where the British commuted capital
punishment, they often did this in face of a worse punishment of transportation
and indentured servitude elsewhere, believing that forcing Indians to move
would severely affect their religious practices, funerary rights and caste
structures and thereby constitute a form of social death. Often, the British
would use the bodies of dead prisoners for research – medical or otherwise.
These routine post-mortems became one of the sets of grievances that led to the
Great Indian Rebellion of 1857.
At the same time, the British put in place numerous due process guarantees. As
part of several reform movements in 1837, the Colonial Office sought to
reconcile law on capital punishment in England with that in the colonies, but
inconsistencies remained. As Britain sought to prove its civilising mission,
the push for reforms intensified, but in many ways, this did not reach the
colonies they were intended to benefit and the “theater of execution” continued
in the Indian subcontinent.
When makeshift gallows were proved prone to botched executions, the British,
under heavy criticism, set up new and improved ones. However, problems
persisted: “the drop was often too short, and criminals were on occasion hanged
weighed down with heavy fetters on their legs”.
The death penalty in England itself was inherently problematic. Seeing its rise
in the industrial era, a sentence of death was the penalty for hundreds of
offences from pickpocketing to cutting down a tree to being out at night with a
black face to rape and murder. It was only after sustained activism that the
death penalty was narrowed down by 1861 from 200 offences to 4.
(source: scroll.in)
***************
EU wants Pakistan to end death penalty: Cautain
The European Union (EU) wants Pakistan to abolish the death sentence, not for
attaining GSP status but on the principle that even the best judicial systems
could be wrong at times. This was said by EU Ambassador Jean-François Cautain.
He added that when a top court acquitted a suspect in a murder case, he had
already been hanged. He also highlighted that that many countries had already
failed when they tried to eradicate terrorism with the death penalty.
Cautain made this statement when talking to representatives of the Council of
Pakistan Newspaper Editors at the National Press Club in Islamabad on Friday.
He said that the EU wanted Pakistan to progress in a positive direction. The
press should be able to voice and report on whatever was going on in the
country, he added.
Cautain added that the EU would review the implementation of 27 conventions of
the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights which was a
requirement for GSP plus status in 2020.
He said that the implementation on The Financial Action Task Force (FATF)
regulations as it was beneficial for Pakistan itself not the world.
Abolition of death penalty
Moreover, he expressed that Pakistan and India could live in peace like France
and Germany but it required the commitment of leadership. The ambassador
assured that the EU would raise the issue of human rights violations in Kashmir
with India.
He said that Pakistan’s export to Europe had increased 55 % after the country
acquired GSP Plus status.
He also added that the EU was focusing on improving education, vocational
training, women development and governance in Pakistan.
The ambassador said EU’s new engagement plan for Pakistan was moving ahead in
strategic and security level. He said this plan will further improve military
to military relations between EU and Pakistan.
Moreover, he informed that the EU wanted to see huge investments in Pakistan.
However, any investor would look for how the justice system and media of a
country were before making any kind of investment.
He added that they had also worked on improving abilities of lawmakers in
Pakistan so they could introduce legislations in favor of the masses.
Answering a question relating preservation of historic sites, he said that he
felt abysmal by looking at the condition of Mehrgarh while travelling between
Quetta and Karachi. He added the the historic site had been damaged due to a
dispute between 2 local tribes.
He added that relics did not belong to a certain nation but to the worldwide
population.
Moreover, he expressed that he would always remember Pakistan in his memories.
Later, he also planted a sapling in the lawn of National Press Club.
(source: The Express Tribune)
SRI LANKA:
Fonseka hits out at Sajith for supporting death penalty
Field Marshal Sarath Fonseka says that UNP Deputy Leader Sajith Premadasa
always fulfills the needs of the President and supports his statements.
The UNP Parliamentarian also said that if the incumbent Prime Minister does not
stand for candidacy at the upcoming presidential election and if the
alternative candidate is not an individual who can contribute to the country,
he is opposed to that.
Responding to a question from reporters regarding the implementation of the
death penalty, the former Army Commander said that an attempt is being made to
hang certain prisoners with the intention of gaining votes.
He said the UNP’s stance is against the death penalty and that they stick by
that stance. However, he said that party’s deputy leader Minister Sajith
Premadasa always fulfills the needs of the President and approves of his
statements.
Fonseka was referring to Premadasa’s recent comments in support of the
President’s decision to implement the death penalty against certain convicted
drug traffickers.
He also said that before the government was toppled for 51 days, Premadsa had
said that the UNP is indebted to the President and after the constitutional
crisis ended he commended the President for safeguarding democracy.
(source: adaderana.lk)
PHILIPPINES:
How we kill: Notes on the death penalty in the Philippines
(First of two parts)
A week after assuming office, neophyte senators Christopher “Bong” Go and
Ronald “Bato” dela Rosa proposed the reinstatement of the death penalty through
Senate Bills (SB) 207 and 226, respectively. Two incumbent senators refiled
what they had proposed before: Ping Lacson sent in SB 27, Manny Pacquiao SB
189.
Before filing SB 226, Dela Rosa verbally expressed his desire to have criminals
guilty of drug trafficking executed in public by firing squad with live media
coverage.
He assumed that it will be a deterrent:”Yung gawing public na maging
katakot-takot sa mga tao na gumawa, para hindi pamarisan.(To make it publicly
gruesome to the people who committed it so others will be deterred from
committing the same crime.) ”
The bill that he filed, though, specifies no measure on how convicts should be
executed or whether the execution should be made public at all. He said he
changed his mind on the matter after hearing out a plea from one of his
daughters.
A week later, when pressed by broadcast journalist Karen Davila for proof that
the death penalty deters crime, Senator dela Rosa brushed aside the issue by
saying that nothing will get done if proof is always demanded.
The import of his proposed legislation lies in his own personal experience as
former head of the Bureau of Corrections, and not in some scientific research.
He claimed a convicted Chinese drug lord advised him that the only way to stop
the drug trade is to execute those who are involved in drug trafficking.
So, this is now how we conduct policy making and legislation. A situation not
far removed when kings handed down laws and executions were, by design, a
carnival of horror— half a millennium ago.
If the history of capital punishment in the Philippines is any indication, its
imposition has always proven to be a regressive step, both in dealing with
criminality and in assigning value to human dignity
. The theater of the macabre
Based on the accounts of 16th- and 17th-century Spanish priest chroniclers like
Francisco de Santa Ines, Juan Francisco de San Antonio, Joan de Plaçençia, and
Francisco Colin, indigenous Philippine society practiced the death penalty.
The condemned can be tied to a post and speared or whipped to death, hanged, or
simply stabbed by the offended party as authorized by the village chief.
The accounts were unclear, if not silent, if other people in the community were
made witness to such executions.
But distinct in imposing death as punishment in early Philippine societies was
the chance given to the culprit to negotiate his or her way out of it. One can
settle the penalty of death by either paying in gold or making one’s self a
slave to the offended party.
Only with the founding of the Spanish colonial regime in the 16th century did
executions start to approximate what Dela Rosa and fellow pro-death penalty
legislators may have in mind on why and how the death penalty should be
imposed.
In 1588, Estevan de Marquina, notary public of Manila, wrote in his report that
Agustin de Legazpi and Martin Panga, leaders of a conspiracy of an uprising
against the Spaniards, “being convicted by witnesses, were condemned to be
dragged and hanged; their heads were to be cut off and exposed on the gibbet in
iron cages, as an example and warning against the said crime.”
200 years later, the Spanish colonial authority still relied on the theater of
the macabre to stamp the power of the king on the bodies of colonial subjects.
And the Filipinos seemed to keep on failing to learn the lesson of the gallows
and of mutilated corpses not to revolt against Spain.
In 1807, leaders of the Basi Revolt in Piddig, Ilocos Norte, were hanged; their
heads were then cut off, put inside cages, and displayed in public places.
In a span of two centuries, the key changes introduced in imposing the death
penalty were in the methods of execution: firing squad and garrote. Death by
musketry was reserved for those tried in a military tribunal, often for
treason, rebellion, and sedition--crimes against the king and the state.
In 1841, for example, Apolinario de la Cruz, a leader of a revolt in Southern
Luzon, was executed by a firing squad and his body was dismembered and
exhibited in public.
In the 19th century, Madrid repeatedly ordered that hanging be done away with.
The 1st order to have reached Manila came out in 1812. Instead of strict
observance, however, the first half of the 19th century saw the application of
all 3 methods of execution.
Jose Montero y Vidal recorded that an April 24, 1832 decree of the King of
Spain (received May 13, 1832 in Manila) ordered that hanging be abolished and
replaced by the garrote.
The shift in method of execution was a response to the spread of Enlightenment
thought in the royal courts of Europe. Hanging and its attendant acts of
mutilation were considered unspeakable acts of barbarity, which has no place in
societies ever on their forward march towards civilization.
Garrote
Orders from Madrid notwithstanding, hanging held sway in the Philippines. The
garrote had to wait its turn. What remained was the bloody spectacle of
executions. In an 1819 account, John White, an English traveler in Manila,
described the hanging that he witnessed as a “diabolical scene.”
“The hangman was habited in a red jacket and trowsers, with a cap of the same
colour upon his head . . . I know not; but never did I see such a demoniacal
visage as was presented by this miscreant; and when the trembling culprit was
delivered over to his hand, he pounced eagerly upon his victim, while his
countenance was suffused with a grim and ghastly smile, which reminded us of
Dante’s devils. He immediately ascended the ladder, dragging his prey after him
till they had nearly reached the top; he then placed the rope around the neck
of the malefactor, with many antic gestures and grimaces, highly gratifying and
amusing to the mob.
"To signify to the poor fellow under his fangs that he wished to whisper to his
ear, to push him off the ladder, and to hump astride his neck with his heels
drumming with violence upon his stomach, was but the work of an instant. We
could then perceive a rope fast to each leg of the sufferer, which was pulled
with violence by people under the gallows; and an additional rope, or, to use a
sea term, a preventer, was round his neck, and secured to the gallows, to act
in case of accident to the one by which the body was suspended.”
Yet, instead of conveying fear to the Manileños, “it was a tragic comedy” for
them. The “mass of spectators . . . view the whole scene with feeling not far
remote, I fear, from that kind of satisfaction which a child feels at a raree
show.”
Dismembering the bodies of convicts seemed to have stopped with the
introduction of the garrote. It was only after the 1887 Spanish Penal Code took
effect that the use of the garrote in executions was seriously enforced.
In 1890, a royal decree reiterated that the firing squad was only for those
tried under the Code of Military Justice. But all executions remained public.
Article 103 of the 1887 Spanish Penal Code even specified that “the corpse of
the person executed shall remain exposed in the gallows for 4 hours.”
The 1887 Spanish Penal Code remained in effect until 1932, when the current
Revised Penal Code was introduced. What the American colonizers did upon their
conquest in 1898 was intro-duce amendments to the 1887 Spanish Penal Code to
fit the imposition of the death penalty to their own regime.
On December 18, 1906, the Philippine Commission Act (PCA) 1577 ordered that all
executions must be done inside the Bilibid Prison in Manila. This step forward
was coupled with a regressive step. Enacted on September 2, 1902, PCA 451
brought back hanging as a mode of execution. PCA 1577 was also not applicable
in Muslim Mindanao.
Hanging, the use of firing squad, and public execution—brutal remnants of
monarchic and imperial penal regimes—will be revisited and reapplied in the
20th century by regimes seeking vengeance and ever conscious of appearing tough
on crime.
Right after the end of World War II, 17 Japanese soldiers were hanged in the
New Bilibid Prison in Muntinlupa. Generals Tomoyuki Yamashita and Masaharu
Homma, erstwhile leaders of the Japanese forces in the Philippines sentenced to
death by American military tribunals for their supposed war crimes, met their
fates differently inside a prison camp in Los Baños, Laguna.
Yamashita was hanged; Homma was executed by a firing squad. In possible
consideration of Homma’s tenuous involvement in the crimes with which he was
charged, the military tribunal was said to have afforded him the honor of a
soldier’s death.
Lim Seng
27 years after Homma’s death by musketry, another death squad was formed and
ordered by a military tribunal to carry out an execution. But this time, it was
not a matter of honor.
The January 15, 1973, execution of Lim Seng for drug charges was a high point
in propaganda for Ferdinand Marcos’ dictatorial regime. It was meant to put an
end to the illegal drugs trade during that era.
Though Lim was originally tried and sentenced to life imprisonment in a
civilian court, Marcos decreed that his case be tried in a military tribunal.
His execution was witnessed by thousands in the early morning hours in Fort
Bonifacio.
It was also an on-camera execution, making possible its broadcast in television
and repeated showing in cinemas. And nearly 45 years later, the recording of
said execution finally made its way into social media, again for everyone to
see.
Marcos propagandists take pride that under his martial law regime, “He did not
implement a Death Penalty to a Filipino during and after Martial Law.” One can
read that in a huge poster in Marcos’s World Peace Center in Batac.
Lim was Chinese after all. But what of Epifanio Pujinio, Salvador Egang,
Gaudencio Mongado, Belesande Salar, Jilly Segador, Causiano Enot, Nicolas
Layson, Cesar Ragub, Cesar Fuguso, Leonardo Dosal, Juan Galicia, and Marcelo
San Jose? Their pictures hang in the New Bilibid Prison in Muntinlupa, in the
gallery of convicts executed by electric chair from July 31, 1973 until October
21, 1974.
Even historian Alfred McCoy bought the Marcos lie before offering this
critique: “Lim Seng would become the only criminal legally executed in the 14
years of martial law. But there would be thousands of extrajudicial killings of
labor leaders, student activists, and ordinary citizens, their bodies mangled
by torture and dumped for display to induce terror.”
Isn’t this where we are again today?
----
How we kill: Notes on the death penalty in the Philippines (Part 2)
(Second of 2 parts)
Killing Them Softly
The history of the death penalty in the Philippines in the 20th century is the
history of the state’s pursuit to clinically execute convicts. The political
leaders may all have wanted to act tough on criminals, yet, in the execution
chamber, the functionaries of the state went to great lengths to relieve or
mask the pain for the convict in the course of an execution.
They did not always succeed.
Hanging is supposed to kill convicts not by choking them to death, but by
breaking their neck during the drop. But as described in John White’s account,
it became an excruciating ordeal, with at least three people humping, and
pulling at, the convict’s body just to ensure a quick death.
The garrote is supposed to be an improvement on hanging. Instead of breaking
the neck in an unsure manner, the garrote, at a turn of a screw, will snap the
spinal cord and detach the neck from the skull, leading to instantaneous death.
As with hanging, the actual practice differed from the mechanical calculations.
An account by Felix Roxas, a curious child in the closing days of the Spanish
empire, recalled seeing the faces of convicts on public display after being
garroted with “protruding tongues” and “open eyes” bearing the marks not of
snapped spinal cord but of “strangled necks.”
The electric chair
Then in 1923 came the electric chair. Mariano Jesus Cuenco, the author of
Philippine Legislature Act (PLA) 3104 that changed the method of execution from
hanging to electrocution, firmly believed that the electric chair will kill the
convict instantaneously, unlike the excruciating death that hanging offered,
which to him is “ignominious and barbaric.”
Cuenco’s legislation even bears this provision that eventually became Article
81 in the Revised Penal Code:
“The death sentence shall be executed with preference to any other and shall
consist in putting the person under sentence to death by electrocution. The
death sentence shall be executed under the authority of the Director of
Prisons, endeavoring so far as possible to mitigate the sufferings of the
person under sentence during electrocution as well as during the proceedings
prior to the execution. If the person under sentence so desire, he shall be
anaesthetized at the moment of the electrocution.”
Of the 85 convicts that died in the electric chair, 17 requested to be
anesthetized. Of equal number were those who refused any anesthesia.
Some of them were advised by their priests to shun anesthesia for them to be
clearheaded in their prayer in the last moments of their lives. The accounts or
records of the other executions made no mention whether the convicts were given
drugs to dull the pain of death.
Death in the electric chair was, no doubt, painful and gruesome. The physician
and the executioner would often coordinate to make sure that outward signs of
pain were muted.
As retold by Dr. Ricardo V. de Vera, a physician who served at executions in
the New Bilibid Prisons from 1959 until the ‘70s:
“Seeing everything is all set, I watch carefully the man strapped on the seat.
His breathing is labored, and I can see very well the rising and falling of his
chest as he respires. Inspire. Expire. Inspire. Expire. At the exact moment of
expiration, I press the buzzer. A fraction of a second later 2 switches, one
real and the other a dummy, simultaneously close permitting electric current to
slam through the body of the doomed man. He shakes violently, the face and the
body contort, his skin blackens, and an eerie sound emanates from the chair.
But no sound comes from his lips because the lungs are devoid of air. After 3
minutes the current is switched off, and the body slumps with a thud.”
But there were botched executions. On April 28, 1950, Alejandro Carillo had to
be electrocuted twice before he was declared dead; an electrical malfunction
happened during the execution.
A number of convicts literally burned in the electric chair. The smell of
burning flesh tested the endurance of the witnesses; more so when there were
successive executions in a day. On December 28, 1951, a journalist passed out
after witnessing 3 executions in a span of 22 minutes.
Emiterio Orzame Jr., however, showed extraordinary strength; when he was about
to be executed on March 31, 1967, he ripped out the leather restraints and
jumped out of the chair.
Dwight Conquergood, a scholar on how death penalty is performed, argued:
“Botched executions knock down the ritual frame and expose the gruesome reality
of actually putting a human being to death. The illusion of nonviolent decency
is torn away. Botched executions also are the stuff of sensational news stories
and political embarrassments. Graphic images and grisly reports of botched
executions erode the public faith in the ‘ultimate oxymoron: a humane killing.
To prevent embarrassing glitches and disruptions, modern executions have become
ever more controlled, engineered, and bureaucratized performances.’”
Lethal injection
At present, the use of lethal injection is the epitome of this kind of death
work.
The 1987 Constitution merely suspended the imposition of the death penalty by
saying that “neither shall death penalty be imposed, unless, for compelling
reasons involving heinous crimes, the Congress hereafter provides for it.”
And, in 1994, Congress did provide for the reimposition of the death penalty
for certain heinous crimes by virtue of Republic Act (RA) 7659. The preferred
method of execution in RA 7659 is the gas chamber.
But 2 years after the law took effect, the government was not able to build
one. Going back to the electric chair was out of the question. Besides its
documented cruelty, the execution chamber housing it was, in a rare display of
poetic justice, hit by lightning and burned down on July 8, 1986.
In 1996, RA 8177 amended both RA 7659 and Article 81 of the Revised Penal Code;
it provided for lethal injection as the means of execution. Seven convicts were
killed via lethal injection from February 5, 1999 until January 4, 2000.
Then on June 24, 2006, Congress passed RA 9346, effectively abolishing the
death penalty.
In the 76 years spanning the first execution in the electric chair on June 25,
1924 until the last execution via lethal injection, the state had claimed 92
lives. Their executions should have been object lessons promoting fear and
docile citizenship.
But the state was caught in a bind. It can get rid of monsters but it cannot be
perceived as imposing the death penalty in a monstrous manner. This provided
the convicts with ways to reassert their humanity.
Marcial “Baby” Ama, upon his execution on October 4, 1961, donated whatever was
left of his earthly belongings to the Home for the Aged and Infirm. In the
1960s, several executed convicts donated their eyes for those needing
transplant. Casimiro Bersamin, a Bataan veteran and a convicted murderer, asked
that he be shown the Philippine flag as his last wish during his execution on
July 21, 1951. Leo Echegaray, convicted child rapist, had a wedding on December
28, 1998; he was the 1st to be executed by lethal injection on February 5,
1999. Others simply walked to their death with all the calm and dignity that
they could muster.
It is the height of irony for the public to learn not contempt and terror, but
a lesson in human dignity offered by a criminal condemned to death. Instead of
witnessing the end of monstrosity of a criminal life, the public sees the
monstrosity of its government.
A look at the history of the killing of convicts in the Philippines yields the
lesson that a state relying on murder as a tool to impose its authority is weak
and insecure, and unremoved from the very barbarity it would like to extirpate.
The monstrosity of the criminal will be just a mirror image of the monstrosity
of the state.
As Polish sociologist and philosopher Zygmunt Bauman argued, the “audacious
dream of killing death”—the act of preserving society from the “dangerous
classes”—turns into the practice of killing people."
Aren’t we already doing that?
(Joel F. Ariate Jr. is a university researcher at the Third World Studies
Center, College of Social Sciences and Philosophy, University of the
Philippines Diliman. VERA Files is put out by veteran journalists taking a
deeper look at current issues. Vera is Latin for “true.”)----abs-cbn.com)
MALAYSIA:
Terengganu Man Who Killed His Village Mate By Mowing Him Down Has Been
Sentenced To Death
A 45-year-old lorry driver from Setiu, Terengganu was sentenced to death by the
High Court in Kuala Terengganu today, 14 July
The lorry driver, who is a widower with 3 children, was found guilty of killing
his village mate by mowing him down in 2014.
The accused was charged with killing 49-year-old Rohadi Zakaria on the Kampung
Jelapang highway in Sungai Tong, Setiu, at 6pm on 2 October 2014.
Judge Zainal Azman Ab Aziz sentenced the accused, Azami Mohamad, to death after
finding him guilty of the charge under Section 302 of the Penal Code (KK) for
murder.
According to reports, Azami mowed down Rohadi and his friend, who was badly
injured, over a cattle sales misunderstanding.
Prior to the incident, Rohandi and his friend were said to have quarrelled with
Azami at a coffee shop in Setiu. Following which, the 2 victims left for their
home.
However, Azami chased them in his Proton Gen 2 car and ran them down.
The impact caused the 2 to fall onto the middle of the road. The suspect then
made a U-turn and mowed them down again before fleeing, according to NST
Online.
While Rohandi died after being mowed down, his friend, 48-year-old Zakaria
Taib, who was seriously injured, survived the murder attempt by Azami.
About half an hour after mowing the 2 victims, Azami went to Permaisuri police
station in Setiu to lodge a false police report
The 45-year-old claimed that he was kidnapped by 2 men at knifepoint and that
he rammed into them while trying to escape.
During their investigation, police discovered he was lying about the
kidnapping.
While announcing the death sentence, Judge Zainal also sentenced him to 10
years in prison for the attempted murder of Zakaria and 6 months for making a
false report.
While reciting his judgment today, Judge Zainal remarked on the government's
proposed plan to abolish the death penalty
Although the defence has argued there is a trend (government) to abolish the
mandatory death sentence but as long as the amendments are not made, the court
is still bound by existing law.----Judge Datuk Zainal Azman Ab Aziz.
The widower, who will leave behind 3 children, will serve his jail sentences
concurrently from the date of arrest on 2 October 2014.
(source: syas.com)
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