[Deathpenalty] death penalty news----worldwide

[Rick Halperin]

May 20



SAUDI ARABIA:

Last-Minute Reprieve Saves Death Row Prisoner


The Reconciliation Committee scored another victory by saving the life of
a man who had been sentenced to death moments before his execution at
Taifs Execution Square on Friday.

More than 2,000 people had gathered to witness the execution of Muhammad
Al-Sufyani. Muhammad Al-Bishi, the executioner, prepared his sword and
took position for the execution. It was then that the brother of the
victim raised his hand and announced that he had pardoned the killer
seeking nothing in exchange except reward from God.<

People, who had gathered, cheered the decision and congratulated the
victim's brother for the last-minute change of mind.

Salem Al-Thagafi, member of the Reconciliation Committee in Taif, said
that people cried out of joy when they heard the news. "We arrived early
at the execution square to try for the last time to secure a pardon. We've
been trying to get a pardon for quite some time but without any success.
We brought the heads of various tribes to talk to the victim's brother and
after hours of negotiation, the Reconciliation Committee managed to win
the pardon and save the man," Al-Thagafi said.

Al-Sufyani was found guilty of knifing his victim following a fight
between the 2 men. The committee has been working on the case for a long
time and had traveled to Najran, where the family of the victim lives, to
secure a pardon.

This is the committee's 1st achievement since Prince Khaled Al-Faisal was
appointed the new governor of the Makkah region.

(source: Arab News)






UNITED ARAB EMIRATES:

Death sentence for killing wife, son


A court in Orissa yesterday awarded death sentence to a man for killing
his wife and their 1-year-old son in the steel city of Rourkela last year
over a family quarrel.

The judge of a Rourkela fast track court, Sobhan Kumar Das, handed down
the sentence to Mohan Mohant, a tribal, for killing his wife and their son
at their residence in Rourkela, 470km from here, on January 12 last year.
Mohant was arrested on July 23 and charge-sheeted after he confessed to
have committed the crime. At least 21 witnesses were tried in the court.

(source: Khaleej Times)






AUSTRALIA/SUDAN:

Brisbane man's death sentence countdown


A Brisbane man who could face the death penalty after allegedly murdering
a Ukrainian engineer in southern Sudan will not know his fate until
tomorrow.

George Forbes was due to be sentenced on Friday night (Australian time)
but the judge adjourned the matter to May 21.

Forbes, 45, who has been working for a private Kenyan company in southern
Sudan, was arrested in March and charged with murder and several other
offences.

Murder is punishable by death in southern Sudan.

A Department of Foreign Affairs (DFAT) spokesman today said Forbes had
support from the British consul, who came from Juba to the court in the
southern Sudanese capital Rumbek yesterday.

The British consul would return for the court case on Monday, he said.

In the meantime, the Australian would be held in his company's compound,
where he is receiving appropriate medical care for ongoing health
problems.

Forbes had spent a brief period in jail, but was released into the
company's care on May 2 due to serious health concerns.

The Australian was arrested with a number of other workers from Trax
International Construction after Mykola Serebrenikov, who worked for
another company, was found hanged in a bathroom at Trax's compound in
Rumbek.

An autopsy listed suicide as the cause of death.

Seven men, including Forbes, were reportedly arrested but 4 have since
been released.

Foreign workers in the area have claimed that Mr Forbes and 2 Kenyan
colleagues got into trouble in Rumbek because of their "kindness", saying
they were being victimised for being foreigners.

(source: Brisbaane Times)




INDONESIA/MALAYSIA:

Embassy collecting data about Indonesians facing death sentences in KL


Indonesian Embassy to Malaysia is now collecting data about Indonesians,
who are facing death sentences and being jailed in many prisons across
Malaysia.

"The number of 109, seven of whom have been punished by the Malaysian
Supreme Court, is not a final figure. The embassy is now collecting date
from jails across the country," embassy spokesman Eka A Soeripto, was
quoted by Antara news agencyas saying.

Eka, however, did not say when the embassy could finish its data
collection, but he said that not all Indonesians facing death penalty came
from Aceh but also from other Indonesian regions.

Previously, a team said by the Aceh provincial administration, had also
visited Malaysia to seek information about Acehnese facing death penalty.

(source: Jakarta Post)



CANADA:

The agony of the executioner----How a Parkdale man became our 1st official
hangman  and was destroyed by it.


On the morning of Jan. 8, 1908, the murderer John Boyd managed 6 hours of
broken sleep in his Don Jail cell and, at around 7, newspaper readers
learned, he finished a breakfast of toast, 2 poached eggs, and tea. In the
company of two clergymen, he prayed until just before 8, when the door
opened and he looked up to see John Radclive, the hangman, who had also
spent the night at the jail.

"It is about time for them to come for me," Boyd muttered.

Radclive handcuffed Boyd, and the four men left the cell. There were more
than a dozen people waiting outside in the corridor, but nothing could be
heard in the pin-drop silence except the murmur of the ministers reading
psalms together.

40 paces took the group to a small room where 2 windows high in the wall
let in a pale morning light. Outside, factory whistles sounded for the
morning shift, and streetcars squeaked and rumbled.

Soon Boyd  who had killed a man the previous June at a York St. restaurant
over a sexual rivalry  was standing on the 2 trap doors in the centre of
the floor, and Radclive began the familiar routine he had repeated again
and again throughout his professional life: drop the hood over the man's
head, strap his legs together, and tighten a noose of stretched Manila
rope 3/4 of an inch thick and of a length carefully calculated to take
into account Boyd's height and weight, under his left ear. All was
prepared.

"The Lord's Prayer," Radclive said loudly, and one of the clergymen began:
"Our Father... "

At one point he broke down and had to make an obvious effort to control
his voice.

Boyd stood waiting on the drop until the words "deliver us from evil,"
when Radclive pulled the lever. "With a loud rattling noise the doors fell
under, and the doomed man disappeared from view," reported The Toronto
Daily Star.

"All that could be seen from outside the room was a slight movement of the
rope."

Radclive left immediately.

"It was evident he wanted to get away as speedily as possible." After
leaving the room, Radclive wandered around the jail corridors, clearly
distraught.

"Another poor soul gone," he was heard to say.

Radclive was appointed Canada's 1st professional hangman in 1892 after
carrying out several successful hangings for various Ontario sheriffs.
Less well-known than his successor, Arthur English, Radclive  his surname
also appears in accounts of the day as Radcliffe, but Radclive is the
spelling in city directories and on his death certificate  embodied the
contradictory ideas that define the concept of the executioner.

He was often the centre of attention but was, by necessity, an outsider.
He had power but also a sense that he had debased himself. He stirred
feelings of curiosity and revulsion and, perhaps in some, a kind of envy.

"These are individuals who really considered themselves to be
professionals," explains Jeffrey Pfeifer, a psychology professor at the
University of Regina who is working on a book on the death penalty in
Canada.

"They were engaged in something that was sanctioned by the people of
Canada but were treated as pariahs, and never came to gain the respect of
the public. I think that wears on you after awhile. When you look at the
hangmen, they are absolutely out there by themselves."

It would have taken a remarkably self-possessed person to have managed, or
at least ignored, all these contradictory forces for several decades.

By all appearances, the British hangman Albert Pierrepoint led a calm and
balanced life, dying quietly in an old age home at 87, having coldly
executed more than 400 people over the course of 2 decades. But he was an
exception. Radclive wasn't.

"If he were a man of delicate sensibilities," the Star wrote of Radclive
in 1900, "he would not be the hangman. He is a necessity in our system,
but he should be treated as if he is the hole in the floor of the
gallows."

Part of Radclive's job, then, was to be a ritual outcast, doing something
that was seen as necessary but inherently repellent. Put another way, his
role was to go to a place and, as he boarded a railway car bound for
Toronto, carry away with him a certain shame.

Radclive spent his early life in the Royal Navy, where he helped hang
pirates in the South China Sea. He later apprenticed under the English
executioner William Marwood, who invented the table of height and weight
that was used to determine the length of rope for an execution.

Marwood was (in)famous enough to be immortalized in a schoolyard riddle:

Q: If pa killed ma, who'd kill pa?

A: Marwood!

In 1892, after several successful hangings in Canada, a period during
which he also held down a job as a steward at the Sunnyside Boating Club,
Radclive was put on the federal payroll as an executioner after lobbying
by then-Ontario premier Oliver Mowat.

Another system, which the British Home Office used, was to pay
executioners on a piecework basis, but Canadian officials found it
impossible to retain skilled hangmen that way.

"There is not a living in it," Radclive's eventual successor, Arthur
English  who announced in 1912 that he was on strike after his retainer
was taken away  told the Star.

On top of the uncertainty, sheriffs didn't always pay their bills after an
execution  though most of us would think twice about literally cheating
the hangman.

Radclive can be proven to have executed at least 69 people in Canada, but
his total was probably far higher. (Record-keeping at the time was often
spotty, and the identity of the hangman isn't always clear.)

>From Confederation until the death penalty fell into disuse after the 1963
election, 701 people were executed in Canada. Hangings in Toronto were
carried out in several places, such as the present site of the King Edward
Hotel, around Court St. near Church St., where a large crowd watched
rebels Samuel Lount and Peter Matthews hanged in 1838, and a
now-demolished jail at King St. W. and Strachan Ave.

In the latter part of the 19th century, executions began to take place at
the Don Jail. After 1905, the outdoor scaffold at the Don was abandoned,
and hangings were moved inside the jail, which saw Canada's last
executions in December 1962.

Meanwhile, with the financial stability that Radclive's regular salary
gave him, he was able to settle down. In 1893, he moved into a new house
in Parkdale, on Sorauren Ave. north of Queen St. W., and later lived
around the corner on Fern Ave.

Both are substantial brick houses: the Sorauren Ave. house was appraised
at $1,835 in 1895, about 2 1/2 times Radclive's $700 annual salary as
hangman. (It sold last year for $667,000.) The Fern Ave. house, which is
smaller, was valued at around $1,000. He had a mortgage on both houses.

After his death, it turned out that Fern Avenue had made its peace with
its odd resident over the years. "The little children who weren't
frightened of him just loved him," one neighbour told the Telegram.

His name appeared in city directories but, unlike the usual practice at
the time, without noting his profession. Property tax records list him as
a "civil servant." His death certificate describes him as "high sheriff."

Most career hangmen were destroyed by their profession. On top of the
natural stress and isolation of the job, an executioner was ensnared in
society's hidden ambivalence about the death penalty among people who
would have said they supported it  but transferred their guilt and disgust
to him.

"Among all, the hangman is selected for opprobrium, especially by those
who favour and support his function in society," The Globe wrote in an
editorial in 1910, when Radclive's successor was being hired.

"Whether secrecy or publicity is more demoralizing to the public is a
debated question, but the impulse to hide everything connected with the
act from sight seems to spring from the same instinct that despises the
hangman. The public are responsible for executions, as with all official
acts. They are responsible for the methods adopted. Perhaps in seeking an
explanation of the contempt manifested toward the hangman we will discover
the need for changes in this last resort of criminal law. It is an
unpleasant subject, but it is a public question, and it is a public
function for which all are responsible."

Quite apart from his profession, Radclive was a hard man to warm to. In
1892 he started a brawl in Hull after he announced in a bar that he had
"come to hang a Frenchman, and hoped it would not be the last." He was
badly beaten and had to be rescued by a wagonload of police.

A few years later in Vancouver, the Star reported, he proposed to cut off
the queue (pigtail) of a condemned Chinese man "and divide it up as
souvenirs of the occasion, and altogether expressed himself in ways that
show him to be a person of coarse temperament."

He was also notorious for selling rope to the curious after hangings  that
might or might not have actually been used.

Interviewed in the 1930s, English said a British Columbia sheriff once
actually caught Radclive in a hardware store buying lengths of rope to
sell.

At some point, Radclive started a ritual of draining a full bottle of
brandy after each execution. Following an 1899 hanging at a Manitoba jail,
writer Howard Engel said, he borrowed an empty cell in which to drink and
wait for his train.

Even old-school reporters and jail officials were startled by how much
Radclive drank.

In 1910, a reporter from the Telegram sat with him in a Stratford hotel
room on a Sunday afternoon before a Monday hanging and watched him drink
steadily, "drinking his beer from the bottle, never using a glass."

"I'm getting shaky," he said, "and I'll soon be all in."

Radclive seems to have been either very drunk or painfully hung over
nearly all the time, at least in the period around a hanging, though if he
showed up the executions themselves were carried out competently.

"You don't get the sense that English and Radclive are solitary drinkers,"
Pfeifer reflects. "They're heavy drinkers, but they're heavy public
drinkers, which goes against the theory that it's just a simplistic
mechanism to forget. In that case, what do you need people around for? But
you see them going to very public places and getting drunk, and they brag
about what they do."

Later that year, Radclive didn't show up for a hanging in North Bay, not
replying to anxious telegrams from the sheriff, who would have to carry
out the execution himself unless a hangman appeared. Radclive's salary was
based on him agreeing to "hold himself available for all capital cases
that might occur in any part of Canada."

"A man can't be up for this kind of strain all the time," he said in a
Star article before a 1909 hanging in Brampton, after demonstrating his
skill with knots to patrons of a hotel bar.

A reporter writing for the Star tracked him down on a train in Thunder Bay
a few days before Christmas 1906, on his way home from a hanging in
Vancouver, and found him "a mental and physical wreck to all appearances."

"I am a sick man, too sick to talk," he said. "I have been sick a long
time, very sick."

He died in February 1911, at 55, of cirrhosis of the liver in the Fern
Ave. house, where he lived with his mother. His wife, who had left him,
was in England with 2 of his children.

His other 2 children lived in Toronto but, the Telegram explained, they
"did not take any particular pride in the profession of their father."

Shortly before his death, in an interview cited by American psychologist
Rachel MacNair, he had hinted at his inner demons:

"Now at night when I lie down," he said, "I start up with a roar as victim
after victim comes up before me. I can see them on the trap, waiting a
second before they meet their Maker. They haunt me and taunt me until I am
nearly crazy with an unearthly fear."

(source: Toronto Star----Patrick Cain is an editor)






JAMAICA:

Earl Pratt, Mary Lynch and the death penalty


The image of a seemingly unabashed Earl Pratt - nattily dressed and
victorious-looking - emerging from the St Catherine Adult Correctional
Centre after an incarceration of some 30 years for the crime of murder,
raises many questions about the efficacy of the penal system vs the death
penalty.

For the confident-looking man pictured on the front page of yesterday's
edition of the Daily Observer didn't appear to be beyond redemption as
suggested by the imposition on him of the death penalty by the local
judicial system in the 1970s, following his conviction for the fatal
shooting of Mr Junior Anthony Missick.

Indeed, the speech and demeanour of Mr Pratt, who like fashion designer
Mrs Mary Lynch, was freed from prison last Friday, seemed, on the face of
it, to possess an abundance of (arguably inappropriate) confidence in his
ability to make a positive contribution to society. If that really is the
case, we wonder at the rationale behind incarcerating him for so long.

For from a human perspective, 30 years constitutes a generation. As
yesterday's story pointed out, the Jamaica from which Mr Pratt was removed
in 1977 has undergone significant changes that have transformed it into a
totally different society.

And if the objective of imprisonment is rehabilitation, as opposed to
retribution, then it seems that a case study of Mr Earl Pratt is in order
to determine how appropriate it was to have removed him from society for
an entire generation.

We would expect such a study to look at - for future reference - how well,
if at all, his children would have coped in his prolonged absence and what
sort of impact the system may have had on his ability to reintegrate with
society after being away for 30 years.

Did the experience make him truly repentant?

We note that on emerging from prison, he had the presence of mind to
apologise to the family of his victim. Did it take him 30 years to come to
this position? If not, how long? 25? 20?

Could the same result (assuming it is genuine) have been achieved in half
the time? And in the face of the results that such a study turns up, can
we, as a society, continue to cling, in principle, to the concept of the
death penalty?

If we can't, then maybe it's time once and for all to expunge this
particular form of punishment from the law books and indeed, revisit the
entire rationale upon which the punishment for murder - be it cold-blooded
or in the case of Mrs Mary Lynch, the result of what, from her account,
was a 'slow burn' reaction triggered by years of spousal abuse - is
predicated.

(source: Jamaica Observer)






AUSTRALIA:

Opposition to death penalty must be total


As a 6-year-old, former ALP president Barry Jones was tormented by
thoughts about capital punishment. Throughout 1939, the year 2 executions
were held at Pentridge Jail, he lay awake at night, imagining his dark
windowless bedroom as a cell, and casting himself as the condemned man
awaiting the hangman's noose. Throughout his adult life, Jones has
campaigned against the death penalty, beginning in 1962 with the Students
Anti-Hanging Committee, formed in protest against the hanging (later
commuted to a life sentence) of Robert Peter Tait. In 1967, Jones quit his
teaching job to work on the failed campaign to save Ronald Ryan, the last
man executed in Victoria. And just last month, Jones spoke at the
anti-capital punishment rally organised by the parents of Scott Rush, a
member of the Bali nine.

In 1967, then deputy premier Arthur Rylah argued that capital punishment
was necessary to curb the homicide rate. But from the 1980s, with all
local death sentence laws repealed, the focus of Australian opposition to
capital punishment became international  but only in the sense of being
prompted by Australians facing execution overseas.

A "hypocritical" Australian government attitude ensued, Jones says, with
governments opposing the death penalty for Australian nationals overseas,
but supporting it in cases where Australians have been been victims  such
as in the Bali bombings.

If opposition to the death penalty is to be based on a matter of
principle, he says, it has to be consistent  even in tough cases such as
Amrozi and the Bali bombers, or Saddam Hussein.

Prompted by the plight of the 6 Australians on death row in Bali, civil
liberties lawyers are working hard to get the death penalty  and
Australia's stance on it  back on to the political agenda. They emphasise
that any campaign to save the lives of the convicted drug traffickers must
involve a consistent campaign against the death penalty internationally.

"The Australian Government must have a clear, inflexible policy of
opposition to the death penalty," says Lex Lasry, QC  a point he made
repeatedly during the 3 years he worked on the case of convicted drug
smuggler Van Nguyen, executed in Singapore in 2005.

Now representing Bali nine members Andrew Chan and Myuran Sukumaran, the
Melbourne lawyer was instrumental in hiring eminent Indonesian human
rights lawyer Mulya Lubis to represent the Australians in the challenge to
the constitutionality of the death penalty, now taking place in Jakarta's
Constitutional Court.

The court has already heard submissions from expert opponents of the death
penalty. On Wednesday, it will hear evidence from the lawyers who drafted
the 1999 amendments to Indonesia's constitution, making changes that
included an article stating that the right to life "cannot be diminished
under any circumstances". This amendment has provided the basis for the
challenge.

But how do you galvanise the Australian public to care about the fate of a
bunch of convicted drug smugglers  and then to care, as a matter of
principle, about the fate of Indonesian drug dealers or terrorists?

According to Lasry, Australians are not being asked to "care" but to
concentrate on "the principles by which we would claim to live".

"The next step in the argument is whether it is agreed  and I think that
most people do agree  that a community is judged on how it treats its
worst, not its best. That is the greatest test of the principles that we
are supposed to be defending in this war on terror. If we take short cuts
with the people we find repellent, then we are compromising our
principles," he says.

In Jones' view, it would not be difficult to change public opinion on the
issue of capital punishment, because most people tend to be either against
it, or indifferent, not for it . Moreover, he says, the death penalty is
one area where the "political class" are ahead of the public. The vast
majority of conservative Victorian MPs openly opposed capital punishment
for terrorists, even in the emotional aftermath of the Bali bombing.

Lasry says that the 5-year campaign about the essential unfairness of the
David Hicks case showed that the average Australian was more than capable
of coming to grips with legal issues that might have been thought too
arcane for the general public. They are more than ready, he says, to
embrace a debate about the principles underpinning a blanket opposition to
the death penalty.

Lasry says he has no criticism of the Government about the practical
aspects of the Bali nine case, given that the Attorney-General's
Department was funding the case in Jakarta's Constitutional Court. But the
Government was failing to give leadership on matters of principle.

'There is too much talk about putting money in people's pockets. No one is
providing leadership on how we protect the principles that we think are
immutable," he says.

Criminal lawyer Rob Stary says the average Australian needs to care about
the plight of the Bali six because they are Australians, because we
shouldn't support the death penalty for any person, and because our own
Federal Police was complicit in their arrest.

"There is a very powerful argument that (the Bali nine) should have been
allowed to move to their intended destination," Stary says.

Brian Walters, SC, immediate past president of Liberty Victoria, is also
infuriated by the "immorality" of the federal police's conduct. "I have
prosecuted a lot of these cases. (Usually) they wait until they come into
Australia. Then they arrest them."

He says Australians will certainly voice their concern as an execution
date approaches.

"When the time comes when a flying squad is actually going to shoot
Australian citizens, Australians won't like that," Walters says.

John North, immediate past president of the Law Council of Australia, and
Scott Rush's lawyer, has urged the Australian Government to keep up the
pressure on the Indonesian Government. "It is important that diplomatic
and Government pressure continues, rather than awaiting the outcome of the
final legal appeals. What we don't want to see is a flurry of diplomatic
activity when it is all too late," he says.

But Professor Tim Lindsey, director of Melbourne University's Asian Law
Centre, warns that emotional outrage-based campaigns and ultimatums could
be counter-productive in Indonesia, where the colonial era remains within
the living memory of senior politicians. Perceptions that Australia was
throwing its weight around would "play badly in the warungs and the
bazaars", he says.

A positive result in the Constitutional Court would open the way for an
appeal to the President of Indonesia for clemency for the Australians  and
the many Indonesians  facing death sentences. But, he says, Australians
had to remember that the death penalty challenge now under way in the
Jakarta courtroom was a human rights issue for Indonesians, not an appeal
case for 3 Australians.

He says that a "consistent" attitude to the death penalty is required if
Australia is to have any credibility. "Australia never seems to be
concerned about the death penalty in the hands of its major trading
partners. We are silent on the one of the most enthusiastic executors in
the world, the US, our ally; and on China."

(source: The Age)