[Deathpenalty] death penalty news----worldwide

[Rick Halperin]

May 12


BULGARIA/LIBYA:

Bulgarian Patriarch conducts public prayer for medics convicted to death
in Libya


Thousands of people attended a public prayer service Saturday led by
Patriarch Maxim of Bulgaria, who called for a "just verdict" in the case
of six medics sentenced to death in Libya.

The outdoor service, which many clergy of the Balkan country's Orthodox
Christian church attended, was conducted at the foot of the landmark
Alexander Nevski Cathedral in downtown Sofia.

People were holding banners reading "You are not alone" in a show of
support for 5 Bulgarian nurses and one Palestinian doctor who are facing
the death penalty in Libya for allegedly infecting about 400 Libyan
children with HIV.

Among the people in front of the cathedral were relatives of the nurses as
well as the father and the sister of the Palestinian doctor.

"We pray for the motherly mercy of the Holy Virgin for the innocent
Bulgarian nurses, enduring severe suffering on foreign soil, to receive
soonest a just verdict and to return home to their beloved ones," said
Patriarch Maxim, spiritual leader of the country's Orthodox Christians.

The medics were condemned to death in a December retrial amid
international concern over the fairness of Libyan justice. They also were
sentenced to death in 2004.

The sentences were based on the nurses' alleged confessions, but some of
the nurses have said they were tortured into admitting guilt.

The United States and the EU have expressed shock and disappointment with
the verdicts, and have called on Libya to free the nurses and the doctor.

Expert witnesses at the trial testified that the HIV virus was rampant in
the Benghazi hospital where the children were infected before the
Bulgarians began working there in the late 1990s.

The 6 medical workers have been in jail since their arrest in February
1999. They are awaiting the appeal of their convictions and death
sentences before Libya's supreme court.

In a special rite for Saturday's occasion, 3 icons of the Holy Virgin,
believed to be miraculous, were brought from the country's 3 main
monasteries  Troyan, Rila and Bachkovo.

"This is the 1st time the icons were taken out from the monasteries. They
will remain in the cathedral as long as there are people coming to pray
for the release of the medics," said Rev. Dimitar, one of the organizers
of the Mass.

The cathedral will remain open during the entire night Sunday and in the
next days.

(source: International Herald Tribune)






SAUDI ARABIA----executions

3 Pakistanis beheaded in S. Arabia


3 Pakistanis and a Nigerian were beheaded on Friday after being convicted
on charges of drug trafficking in Saudi Arabia.

Pakistani nationals Dheeb Ghulam Haydar and Amir Afzal Khan Qader were
executed in the capital Riyadh for smuggling heroin in their stomachs, a
Saudi Ministry of Interior statement said. Another Pakistani Sajjad Khan
Noor Qwas was beheaded in Jeddah along with a Nigerian on similar charges,
a separate ministry statement said.

With these executions the number of executions carried out in Saudi Arabia
in 2007 stands at 63.

(source: Pakistan Dawn)






JAMAICA:

>From death row to freedom - Earl Pratt to be released after decades in
prison


More than a decade after the United Kingdom Judicial Committee of the
Privy Council recommended that his death sentence should be commuted to
life imprisonment in a landmark ruling for the Caribbean, Earl Pratt will
be released this month from prison.

"The Department of Correctional Services is awaiting a formal notification
regarding the status of parole applicants for May 2007," Major Richard
Reese, commissioner of corrections, disclosed yesterday.

The Gleaner understands that Pratt, now in his 50s, and another
high-profile inmate, Mary Lynch, 62, who was convicted for killing her
husband in the early 1990s, are likely to be released as early as next
Friday, but Commissioner Reese is awaiting the parole unit to complete the
paper work.

The 1994 Privy Council ruling was a landmark case for Pratt and his
long-time friend, Ivan Morgan, who later died of natural causes in prison.
Both were sentenced to death for the October 6, 1977 murder of Junior
Bissick. On three separate occasions the death warrant was read to them
and they were removed to the condemned cells, located next door the
gallows, at the St. Catherine correctional facility, the maximum-security
prison in the parish.

Breach of their rights

But after waiting more than 5 years to be executed, the U.K. Privy Council
cited a breach of their constitutional rights, under Section 17 (1) of the
Constitution Act, which provides that 'no person shall be subjected to
torture or to inhuman or degrading punishment'. This was after they had
appealed the case.

The Privy Council recommended in 1994 that because Pratt and Morgan were
on death row for more than 5 years after their conviction, they should not
be hanged. At the time, the recommendation of the UK Privy Council
provided reprieve for 110 other death row inmates in Jamaica, who were
also waiting for more than 5 years to be executed. No one has been hanged
in Jamaica since 1988.

(source: Jamaica Gleaner)






JAPAN:

Japan urged to come clean on confessions----Police routinely torment
suspects, say activists for a death row convict whose judge admits, 40
years later, that he erred.


The physical evidence that implicated former pro boxer Iwao Hakamada in
the stabbing deaths of a family of four on a summer night in 1966 was
hardly conclusive.

The clothes prosecutors said he had worn during the killing did not fit
him.

The murder weapon Hakamada allegedly used was, according to his lawyers,
too small to make the wounds. And, they said, the door police claimed
Hakamada used to enter and leave the victims' house was locked.

But prosecutors had the most important piece of evidence they needed,
enough for the 3 judges of the Shizuoka District Court to find Hakamada
guilty and sentence him to death.

Hakamada's confession.

It did not matter that Hakamada almost immediately retracted his admission
and then testified during his trial that he had been beaten and threatened
during extended interrogations over 22 days in a police detention cell,
with no lawyer present. His signed admission of guilt has kept him in
prison ever since, through failed appeals, still awaiting an execution
that could come at any time.

Now his conviction is again under scrutiny, after the only surviving judge
of the 3-man panel that found him guilty - by consensus - broke four
decades of silence to say he had always believed that Hakamada's
confession was coerced. The case is seen by analysts here as a stark
illustration of the Japanese legal system's addiction to acquiring
convictions by confession.

"I knew right away that something was wrong with his confession," said the
former judge, Norimichi Kumamoto, after he finally went public with his
belief that he had participated in sentencing an innocent man to die.

Kumamoto, 70, quit the bench 6 months after the 1968 trial, and says he
has carried "hurt in his heart" over his role in sending Hakamada to death
row.

"I have always regretted that I couldn't persuade the chief judge" to
acquit, he says. "He was older than me, and I thought that because he had
experienced the war when freedoms were taken away or oppressed, that he
would understand what had happened to Hakamada.

"But judges in Japan tended to be influenced by the media and social
pressures, and the media were being very aggressive, describing [the
accused] as an evil figure," Kumamoto recalls. "And Japanese tend to
believe that the prosecutors' office, as an arm of the government,
wouldn't do anything intentionally wrong."

Japanese courts deliberate in secret and verdicts are issued under all
three names. (Japan does not have a jury system but plans to introduce a
hybrid form of judges and juries in 2009.) Kumamoto kept his doubts about
the boxer's conviction to himself, maintaining silence even as Hakamada's
confession was cited as the reason for turning down his appeals and a bid
for retrial.

When the ex-judge finally went public in March at a news conference in
Tokyo, much of the subsequent media coverage attacked him for flouting a
law prohibiting judges from disclosing deliberations.

Some, however, did welcome Kumamoto's blistering indictment of the
system's reliance on confessions to maintain a conviction rate that
exceeds 99% in criminal trials. Unlike American law, which gives suspects
the right to have a lawyer present during questioning, Japan allows police
to interrogate people without a lawyer for as many as 23 days before
pressing charges or releasing them. They can then be rearrested, beginning
another 23-day session.

'Substitute prisons'

The suspects are kept in small holding cells known as daiyo kangoku, or
"substitute prisons," a setting that critics say allows police to coerce
confessions to crimes they did not commit. The Japan Federation of Bar
Assns. recently joined human rights groups in contending that holding
suspects in such cramped conditions, with little or no contact with the
outside world, "is a breeding ground of confession coercion and false
accusations."

"This type of interrogation causes heavy mental suffering to suspects and
can be considered torture," the lawyers group said.

Some judges have shown an increased willingness to question the methods
used to acquire confessions. In February, a judge in western Japan
reprimanded police and prosecutors for their handling of a case in which
12 defendants were eventually found not guilty of using beer and cash to
buy votes in a local election.

Six of the suspects had confessed, but the judge ruled that they probably
did so "to please the investigators, as they desperately wanted to be
released."

Police had arrested, released and rearrested some of the suspects - one
defendant was held for a total of 395 days - and some said they had been
told that unless they confessed, their children would be fired from their
jobs. The bullying was so bad that one defendant tried to drown himself,
but was rescued.

In 2 other high-profile cases this year, murder and rape convictions were
overturned that had been based solely on confessions extracted under
intense pressure.

In 2005, the government made slight modifications to the daiyo kangoku
system, allowing video cameras to record questioning in select cases.

But the bar associations say the location of the interview is itself the
problem: a holding cell where a suspect can be questioned at any time, for
any length of time, without food, breaks or a lawyer.

"Even strong people can confess under those circumstances," says Katsuhiko
Nishijima, a Tokyo human rights lawyer who is at the forefront of the
legal campaign to get Hakamada's conviction overturned.

The greatest resistance to introducing new guidelines comes from the
police, Nishijima said. "The police argue that videotaping interviews and
allowing lawyers would destroy the necessary trust between police and the
suspect," he said.

Many here say the dependence on confessions is a cultural phenomenon in a
country where even the best TV detectives are the ones who pull an
admission from the crook in a dramatic interrogation scene rather than
uncover evidence.

"The general public has trust in this confession system," Nishijima says.
"It's in the Japanese DNA: There's a belief that if you commit a crime,
you should come clean and confess. When someone is arrested, the
newspapers report that 'police are now aggressively interrogating the
suspect.' And if he doesn't confess, then the public are unhappy. 'Ah,
he's still denying it,' they say."

That's why the recent criminal trial of fallen Internet mogul Takafumi
Horie for financial malfeasance was seen here as so extraordinary: The
young businessman refused to confess during his incarceration. Other top
executives at his firm quickly admitted guilt to investigators and agreed
to testify against their boss. But Horie held out and, at his trial, made
a rare not-guilty plea. He was convicted anyway.

Maintaining innocence

Since recanting his initial confession, Hakamada, too, has always denied
any guilt. His lawyers say the onetime contender for Japan's flyweight
crown now refuses to see either family or his lawyers, his mental
condition having deteriorated over 28 years in solitary confinement on
death row. In Japan, death row inmates are not told when their sentences
will be carried out and some have awaited execution for decades. The 99
inmates currently awaiting hanging live with the knowledge that their
death will come with as little as a few minutes' warning.

Working on Hakamada's behalf, a team of lawyers and activists, which
includes 12 former Japanese boxing champions, announced this week that
they would petition the Supreme Court for a retrial. They are optimistic
that the late-in-life admission by the judge who helped send him away can
still free Hakamada, who is 71.

The former judge himself, aging and becoming weaker, says he is trying to
right a wrong before it's too late for both of them. Kumamoto saw himself
as a rising star in the judiciary in the mid-1960s, working his way up the
case ladder in Tokyo District Court. He had no compunctions about capital
punishment, having presided over 5 death penalty convictions before
Hakamada's trial.

When he arrived in Shizuoka prefecture to hear the boxer's trial, the
media were clamoring for a conviction. But Kumamoto had also schooled
himself in American case law, using Time magazine as a reference for U.S.
Supreme Court cases of interest. He was particularly impressed by the
Warren court of the 1950s and '60s, lauding it for "its professionalism
and its commitment to the rights of the accused."

Listening to the evidence, Kumamoto says, he believed the boxer was
innocent of the murder charges. Hakamada described in court how police
pulled his hair and slapped him during interrogations that lasted more
than 12 hours a day, and how he was forced to use a portable toilet in the
room. He testified that police threatened to bring his mother and brothers
in for questioning as well unless he confessed.

By the morning of the 21st day, he said, he was dizzy, feverish and wanted
only to rest. Begging for a break, he offered to confess "in the
afternoon" if they would just allow him to rest. Instead, the officers
came back into the room with a document labeled "Confession" and berated
him into signing. He told the court the document was never read to him.

"I wanted a silence and had a headache so just wrote down my name and put
my head down on the table," he testified. "They held my hand and took my
fingerprint."

'Media pressure'

Although the interrogators testified that they did not use force to get
the confession, Kumamoto says he was convinced at the time that it was
unreliable. The retired judge says he had even drafted a thick "not
guilty" ruling to be read in court when the other two judges insisted on a
conviction and ordered him to rewrite the ruling.

"It was half because of the confession, half because of the media
pressure," Kumamoto explains.

He still can't get Hakamada out of his mind. The images come to him in the
late afternoons, he says: the way Hakamada confidently met the judges'
eyes when they entered the courtroom, convinced he was about to be set
free. The way his body slumped and his head fell forward at the guilty
verdict.

"I couldn't hear the words that I had written being read out in court,"
Kumamoto recalls, tears in his eyes. "I almost lost my mind."

Kumamoto said he always hoped that a higher court would overturn the
verdict. He never considered going public until now. Not after he left the
judiciary when a senior judge suggested to him that such a liberal thinker
would be happier and more productive as a lawyer or academic. Not during
Hakamada's appeals and pleas for retrials.

"There was no right time until now," Kumamoto says, refusing to elaborate.

But he's ready to meet Hakamada to apologize. "And I'll stand as a witness
for him in the Supreme Court, if this is possible," he says.

"It's getting late. It's the last chance."

(source: Los Angeles Times)