death penalty news August 12, 2004
INDIA: Death penalty debate won't die out soon Last week Abdul Kalam, the president of India, rejected the mercy petition of Dhananjoy Chatterjee, sentenced to death for raping and murdering a 14-year-old schoolgirl in 1990 in the eastern city of Kolkata, capital of West Bengal state. Chatterjee was sentenced to death by the Indian Supreme Court in 1994. He will be hanged on Saturday at 4:30am at the Alipore Central Jail. The case once again stirred up a debate on capital punishment, with an equal number of people in the pro and anti lobbies. According to a survey by a Kolkata-based English-language daily, 65% of those interviewed wanted Chatterjee, 43, who had been working as a security guard in victim Hetal Parekh's housing colony, to be hanged. But human-rights activist groups including the People's Union of Democratic Rights (PUDR) had been demanding that the death sentence be converted to life imprisonment. The Indian chapter of Amnesty International, which aided Chatterjee's defense lawyers, continues to campaign for the abolition of capital punishment in India. Espousing his anti-death-penalty stand, an activist associated with Amnesty International India reveals that capital punishment has been totally abolished in 90 countries, including all of Europe, Australia, Canada and Mexico. On June 23, the European Union even handed over to India a demarche asking it to consider abolishing capital punishment. The demarche came though Irish authorities, who now hold the presidency of the EU. Only very horrific crimes attract the death penalty in 20 countries. The punishment exists in another 25 countries but no one there has had to face execution in two decades. In South Asia, while Sri Lanka, Nepal, Bhutan and Maldives have done away with the death penalty, it still exists in Pakistan, Bangladesh and India. It is Article 21 of the Constitution of India that allows the state to deprive any person of the right to life. Section 53 of the Indian Penal Code (IPC) also lists "death" as one of the forms of punishment that may be imposed for an offense. In India, such punishments are meted out through hanging. But the Law Commission, which comes under the Indian Law Ministry and recommends legal changes, has suggested switching over to the less barbaric lethal injection. In a landmark judgment in 1983, the Indian Supreme Court held that a death penalty should be awarded only in the "rarest of rare cases". Elaborating, it ruled that this clause could be invoked only "when the murder is committed in an extremely brutal, grotesque, diabolical, revolting or dastardly manner so as to arouse intense and extreme indignation of the community". Since then judges have been toeing the line and, compared with other countries (for example, the United States), there have not been many cases of death by hanging in India. The government, unlike in other countries, does not publish or release exact figures of the number of people sentenced to death. But over the past few years, a few high-profile cases - similar to Dhananjoy Chatterjee's - have made it to the front page of the dailies. On January 29, the Indian Supreme Court converted the life imprisonment of Gnana Prakash, Meesekara Madaiah and two others, known only as Simon and Belavendra, to death sentences for killing 22 people by exploding land mines in a forest in 1993. The four were associates of noted sandalwood and ivory smuggler Veerappan, on the run over the past two decades from police forces of Karnataka and Tamil Nadu states. A month earlier, the Supreme Court had upheld the death sentence awarded by a trial court in Jharkhand state to Sushil Murmu for sacrificing a nine-year-old child before a goddess for his own prosperity. A former political leader, Sushil Sharma, was sentenced to death last November by a New Delhi court for the murder of his live-in partner Naina Sahni. In one of the most grisly cases ever to have been reported in India, Sharma was held guilty for stabbing her to death and then burning her body in the oven of a restaurant in the capital city. Dara Singh was awarded the death sentence last September for burning missionary Graham Staines and his two sons while they were sleeping at night inside a multi-purpose utility vehicle. The case attained religious and political interest, with the Akhil Bharatiya Hindu Surkaksha Samiti (ABHSS) and other Hindu outfits alleging that the harsh sentence had been imposed on account of international pressure and promising to help Singh fight all the way up to the Supreme Court. A court in the eastern state of Bihar in June 2003 sentenced eight people to death and six to life imprisonment for the mass killing of 19 lower-caste Hindus. But the judgment took 15 years in coming, and during this period two of the accused died and three became very old. In December 2002, Judge S N Dhingra ordered capital punishment to Mohammed Afzal, S A R Geelani and Shaukat Hussain for hatching a conspiracy for a militant attack on the Indian parliament building. An additional sessions judge in Nashik, in Maharashtra state, awarded the death penalty in May 2000 to the father-son duo of Prakash and Sandeep Patil for the sensational killing with unlicensed revolvers of Prakash's mother, brother, wife, son and two teenage daughters over a property dispute. In his arguments, the government pleader had also recommended the death penalty. But the most reported case was in January 1989, when Satwant Singh and Kehar Singh were hanged to death in New Delhi's Tihar jail. They were former Indian prime minister Indira Gandhi's Sikh bodyguards and were indicted for gunning her down on October 31, 1984. Irrespective of the severity of the crime, those against capital punishment insist that a human being cannot play God and is not morally justified in taking another human's life. The anti crusaders have numerous arguments against capital punishment: It has no dissuading power over criminals who are calculating, opportunistic or overcome by drugs; there is no evidence to prove that executions deter brutal crimes; and death fails to deter those who commit crimes of passion. Those proved guilty of heinous crimes should definitely be punished, runs their logic, but not by taking away their lives. Putting them behind bars forever should suffice. Outdated Indian laws, enormous manpower shortage, rampant corruption, imperfect policing and communal and religious disparities could all add up to miscarriages of justice taking place, they add. Why, even in the United States, where there is no much stress on the freedom of the individual, there have been numerous instances of innocent people being condemned to death, points out Ramesh Sherigar, a graduate of the Bangalore Law School now attached to a litigation firm in Mumbai. "Over the last decade in the United States, 96 people were released from death row after having been wrongfully condemned to death for crimes they did not commit," he adds. Earlier, according to a 1987 study, 350 people convicted of capital crimes in the US between 1900 and 1985 were found innocent. Some of them escaped by minutes, but 23 were actually executed. The most celebrated case was that of Frank Lee Smith, who was convicted of a 1985 rape and murder and condemned to death row. Smith died in prison after spending 15 years there. His innocence was proved by DNA tests after his death. But those in favor of capital punishment feel that it acts as a very effective deterrent. This view is shared by Gillian Rosemary D'Costa Hart, the principal of the Kolkata school where Hetal Parekh studied. "Everybody is talking about Chatterjee's right to live. What about Hetal's right?" she has asked. Supporting her were residents of the locality where Parekh had lived. They had launched a signature campaign demanding Chatterjee's death and had even sent a deputation to meet President Kalam. Most politicians defended the judgment. The wife of West Bengal Chief Minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharya took the dais at a public meeting called to condemn Chatterjee's ghastly crime. Former deputy prime minister L K Advani has repeatedly asked for the death penalty in rape cases. Actors Madhabi Mukherjee and Biplab Chatterjee addressed public rallies demanding death for the convict. If Dhananjoy Chatterjee were let off with a lighter sentence such as a life term, it would give birth to many more Chatterjees, they said. Even as the debate rages on comes the news of the Bombay High Court confirming the death sentence awarded by a lower court to Shivaji Alhalt, a 42-year-old laborer from Junnar near Pune in Maharashtra state. According to witnesses, under the pretext of providing fuel wood, Alhalt tricked a 10-year-old student (name withheld) to follow him to a nearby hill, where he raped and strangled her. The court termed Alhalt's crime as "the rarest of rare" crimes, a "pre-planned" murder "that did not permit the court to impose a lesser punishment". But as in the Dhananjoy Chatterjee case, the defense has argued for a lenient sentence in view of Alhalt's family status and background. Alhalt is a father of three daughters, one as old as the victim, the defense pleads. There is a sense of deja vu to all this. The anti- and pro-capital-punishment lobbies will soon get into the act, arguing out their oft-repeated lines. The case will slowly move from lower to higher courts. Perhaps a future Indian president may also be dragged into the mess. The capital-punishment debate shows no signs of dying soon. (source: Asia Times)
