[Deathpenalty] death penalty news----worldwide

[Rick Halperin]

Aug. 11



INDIA:

2 get death for Australian woman's murder


A court in New Delhi on Monday handed out capital punishment to 2 taxi
drivers for killing 59-year-old Australian tourist Dawn Emilie Griggs
after criminally assaulting and robbing her in March 2004.

Pronouncing the judgment, Additional Sessions Judge Vinod Kumar awarded
death sentence to Jyotish Prasad and Ashish Kumar, who had been convicted
for murder, criminal assault, robbery and destruction of evidence on
August 2. The court also imposed a fine of Rs.3,000 on each of the
convicts.

"I award death sentence to both the convicts under Section 302 of the
Indian Penal Code. Both the convicts be hanged till death," the Judge
pronounced inside the packed Patiala House courtroom. Drawing a parallel
with the Dhananjoy Chatterjees case in which the Supreme Court had awarded
death sentence to the perpetrator of a similar heinous crime in 2004, the
court said: "If the facts are seen closely, it would be found that the
gravity of the present case is more than the case before the Supreme
Court. In our case, the victim was of such an age that she should have
been seen by the convicts as a motherly figure. Committing rape of an old
lady shows a mind which is more depraved than Dhananjoy Chatterjee's."

Dhananjoy was sentenced to death for the criminal assault and murder of a
minor girl in Kolkata in 1990.

"In the present case, there is a very high degree of certitude and,
therefore, I am unable to restrain myself from awarding maximum
punishment," the Judge said, rejecting the plea of the convicts that they
should not be awarded death sentence.

Griggs, who had arrived in the Capital from Australia via Hong Kong, was
found murdered with stab injuries and her face smashed in a deserted field
near the Indira Gandhi International Airport on March 17, 2004, hours
after she took a pre-paid taxi from the airport.

She had come to India to get enrolled in a meditation course.

While convicting the taxi drivers, the Judge had on August 2 said: "All
the circumstances have been proved by prosecution and lead to irresistible
conclusion that the accused subjected the foreigner to gang-rape and
killed her after robbing her of valuables."

In its 75-page verdict, the court held that the prosecution had
conclusively established the complicity of the drivers by linking them
with the chain of events.

Investigations by a police team led by Inspector J. L. Meena revealed that
Jyotish and Ashish murdered her and tried to decamp with her belongings,
but later dumped them at a distance from the scene of crime.

As there was no eyewitness in the case, the prosecution relied on
circumstantial and forensic evidence including the DNA reports of the
drivers to prove their guilt.

(source: The HIndu)

*******************

SC can fix tenure of life term in lieu of death penalty


The Supreme Court has ruled that in order to minimize the use of death
penalty, it has the power to fix tenure of life imprisonment while
substituting it for death sentence.

A bench comprising Justices B N Agrawal, G S Singhvi and Aftab Alam, while
substituting life imprisonment for death sentence, has ruled that the
appellant Murli Manohar Mishra alias Swami Shraddhananda shall remain in
jail till death.

The apex court in its judgment noted, "further formalization of a special
category of sentence, though for an extremely few number of cases, shall
have the great advantage of having the death penalty on the statute book
but to actually use it as little as possible, really in the rarest of the
rare cases. This would only be a reassertion of the Constitution bench
decision in Bachan Singh case besides being in accordance with the modern
trend in penology.

In light of the discussions made we are clearly of the view that there is
a good and strong basis for the court to substitute a death sentence by
life imprisonment or by a term in excess of 14 years and further to direct
that the convict must not be released from prison for the rest of his life
or for the actual term as specified in the order, as the case may be."
Justice Aftab Alam, writing judgment for the bench, also said, 'This court
can also take judicial notice of the fact that remission is allowed to
life convicts in the most mechanical manner without any sociological or
psychiatric appraisal of the convict and without any proper assessment as
to the effect of early release of a particular convict on society.

The grant of remission is a rule and remission is denied, one may say, in
the rarest of rare cases.' Under section 433 CrPc government has the power
to release a life convict on completion of 14 years in jail after taking
relevant factors into account.

Swami was sentenced to death for burying alive his wife in the backyard of
his house after administering some sedative to her. The death sentence was
confirmed by Karnataka High Court.

The victim, Shakereh, was the ex-wife of former Indian Ambassador to Iran
Akbar Khaleeli. She married the convict after her divorce from Mr
Khaleeli. It was in pursuit of her desire for a male child that she
dissolved her 1st marriage to remarry.

(source: UNI)