November 23
INDIA:
Rajasthan: Man gets death penalty for raping a minor
Father of an infant girl was awarded the death sentence by the Jhunjhunu
(Protection of Children from Sexual Offences) Court in on Friday for raping a
minor on August 2.
This is the 4th case in the state where the accused under POCSO were
handed out death sentence.
Nand Kishore, Special Public Prosecutor, POCSO Court, said this is the first
case when the death sentence has been given to a rapist within 20 days of
presenting the charge-sheet in a court.
Accused Vinod Banjara, 23, is a resident of Dausa and used to sell utensils,
Kishore said.
On August 2, he raped the minor in a village when her maternal grandparents
were away.
The police formed a special team to investigate the case, Kishore said.
"Through CCTVs, the accused was identified and arrested on August 3. He was
remanded into custody where he confessed to the crime," he said.
According to DGP Rajasthan, after death sentence was incorporated in the POCSO
Act for the and killing of minors under 12 years, all police officers were
directed to speedy investigation and filing of charge sheets in the court had
expedited conviction.
He said an accused in the rape of a 6-year-old in on February 14 this year was
handed out death sentence. He said the investigation was completed within 16
days and the court convicted for death on August 24 this year.
Similarly, in another case where a 6-month old baby was raped and killed at
Laxmangarh in Alwar on May 10, the court awarded death sentence to the accused
on July 21. In this case the charge sheet was filed within 26 days after the
incident.
An accused in a similar case reported at Barmer women's police station was
given death sentence on August 7 for raping a 12-year-old girl, he said.
(source: Clayton Caller)
*********************
PIL in SC for execution of death penalty awarded to 4 in Nirbhaya case
A PIL was filed in the Supreme Court Thursday seeking directions to immediately
execute the death penalty awarded to 4 convicts of the sensational Nirbhaya
gangrape and murder case.
The 23-year-old paramedic student was gangraped on the intervening night of
December 16-17, 2012 inside a running bus in South Delhi by 6 persons and
severely assaulted before being thrown out on the road. She succumbed to
injuries on December 29, 2012 at Mount Elizabeth Hospital in Singapore.
The apex court, on July 9, had dismissed the pleas of 3 convicts -- Mukesh
(31), Pawan Gupta (24) and Vinay Sharma (25) -- seeking review of the apex
court verdict which had upheld the judgements of the Delhi High Court and the
lower court in the case.
The 4th death convict Akshay Kumar Singh (33) so far has not filed the review
plea in the apex court.
The apex court in its 2017 verdict had upheld the capital punishment awarded to
them by the Delhi High Court and the trial court in the case.
The fresh PIL, filed by lawyer Alakh Alok Srivastava, said despite a lapse of
more than 4 1/2 months from the date of dismissal of the review petitions of 3
convicts, the death penalty has not yet been executed.
The plea said that in rape-cum-murder cases, the fate of the accused must be
decided in a period of 8 months from the lower court to the apex court.
Such delay in execution of death penalty is acting as a bad precedent and has
resulted in increasing incidents of rapes being reported on daily basis, it
said.
The plea said the fact that the death row convicts have not yet been hanged
despite elapse of more than 5 years of their initial conviction "apparently
gives an impression in the minds of the rapists that they would also be
harmless if they commit such heinous crimes".
The plea also sought guidelines to prescribe strict timelines for speedy
execution of death row convicts in rape-cum-murder cases, so that the remedies
of appeal in high court, appeal, review, curative petition in the apex court
and mercy petition before the president are exhausted by the convicts within
maximum period of 8 months.
(source: business-standard.com)
IRAN:
Iran Lobby Silent on Rising Executions
Iran is the world leader in terms of execution per capita and execution of
juveniles, but especially frequent are the public hangings of political, ethnic
and religious prisoners from a construction crane.
Recently, they have increased their execution rates in response to widespread
domestic protests, international pressure and returning US sanctions, which all
mean that the mullahs are losing control and facing an economic crisis, brought
on by decades of mismanagement and corruption, which has seen the currency
dropped 70% against the dollar and led to inflation.
The latest example was the execution of Vahid Mazloumin, also known as the
"Sultan of Coins", a gold dealer who was accused by Iranian authorities of
contributing to dramatic price rises by hoarding gold, which was a warning to
Iranian merchants and businesses against undermining the Iranian Regime's
policies. He was sentenced to death in October, while his assistant, Mohammad
Esmail Qassemi, was hanged last week on similar charges.
According to the state-run Fars news agency, Mazloumin didn't hold a permit to
trade gold and foreign currency and had created the largest illegal network in
his area, amassing about 2 tons of gold coins and instructing his team to
corner the gold coin market to resell at higher prices. Now, we don't know how
much of the Regime accusations are correct, but what we do know is that these
sort of crimes should not carry the death sentence. In fact, it's a violation
of international law.
The real reason that the Regime has targeted these men and other people accused
of "disrupting the economy" is not to punish those responsible for the crisis -
that is the fault of the mullahs - but to scare the public into submission and
present the false message that everything is fine. Just last week, 130 illegal
currency traders were arrested in large-scale raids by the security forces and
they may well receive the same treatment, which is to peg vague national
security charges onto economic trials, according to the Independent.
Mazloumin's trial and subsequent execution received harsh criticism from human
rights groups who have long pointed out that Iran uses "kangaroo trials" to
imprison large numbers of Iranians and dual-nationals, with Amnesty Internation
calling the trial "grossly unfair"
Hadi Ghaemi, executive director of the Center for Human Rights in Iran, said:
"Iran's hanging of people who have been convicted in courts without a fair
trial is a blatant violation of the law."
One group that has remained surprisingly silent though is the Iran Lobby, who
supposedly advocate on behalf of the Iranian people, but really just promote
the Regime's view.
Laura Carnahan wrote: "What is notable with these new executions was the
silence coming from the Iran lobby, especially groups such as the National
Iranian American Council which ostensibly is supposed to advocate for the
better treatment of Iranians. It's too bad that doesn't seem to apply to those
who actions undermine the regime's efforts to stay in power."
(source: ncr-iran.org)
GREAT BRITAIN:
Laid to rest at last: Edith Thompson, victim of a 'barborous, misogynistic'
death penalty----As she is finally reburied in the same grave as her parents,
those attending the reinterment ceremony say the 29-year-old was guilty of
nothing more than a scandalous love affair and being a woman with 'ideas above
her station'
History will almost certainly record that when they sent Edith Thompson to the
gallows, the case against her was wretchedly weak.
So weak that it could be said her only 'crimes' were to fall in love with a man
who wasn't her husband, to express that love in literary flights of fantasy,
and, perhaps, to be a woman with 'ideas above her station'.
It is also possible she was pregnant, which would have made her execution, on 9
January 1923, illegal.
They hanged her anyway.
In the eyes of the law, and contemporary popular opinion, Edith Thompson was a
murderer, a woman who had incited her much younger lover, Freddy Bywaters, to
plunge a knife into her cuckolded husband Percy as he walked home from an
evening at the theatre on 3 October 1922.
Her mother Ethel Graydon wrote directly to King George V begging for mercy but
Edith, 29, was hanged in Holloway Prison less than a month after a jury found
her guilty.
Then Mrs Graydon begged to be allowed to visit her daughter's grave, or at the
very least to be told where in the grounds of Holloway Prison it was - to
similarly little avail.
It is said that when Ethel passed away in January 1938, her dying wish was for
Edith to be reburied with her in the family grave.
On Thursday that mother’s last wish was granted as the government gave the
executed Edith Thompson perhaps the only scrap of justice left available to
her.
After the Ministry of Justice allowed an exhumation, Edith's mortal remains
were laid to rest in the grave of her mother and father in the City of London
Cemetery - 95 years after William Graydon kissed his daughter on the eve of her
execution and promised: "You will be home at last tomorrow night".
Outside the cemetery church, on a cold, grey afternoon, one of a handful of
bouquets came with a handwritten card: "In loving memory, home at last with mum
and dad".
Among the 50 or so arriving to pay their last respects, there was unanimity
about the injustice.
"She was innocent," said Sue Syms, whose husband Graham is a great-nephew of
Edith's brother. "It was a trial of women's morality.
"She was executed for having a relationship outside marriage, for letters to
her lover that were seen as highly immoral and disgracefully against everything
people believed in at the time."
And yet, they tell you, even in the 1950s, 3 decades after the execution, there
was a lingering sense of awkwardness, perhaps even shame, that ensured children
were ushered out of the living room before the grown-ups of the family dared
discuss the fate of Edith.
She had, it seemed been reluctant to marry shipping clerk Percy Thompson in
1916, after a 7-year courtship that had begun when she was 15. When she told
her sister Avis "I can't go through with it," her father had insisted: "You
must go; everybody is at the church waiting for you."
She was 27 when she began a relationship with 18-year-old Freddy Bywaters.
To compound what would later be seen as the scandal of the 9-year age gap,
Edith wrote Freddy page after page of love letters.
Written in a style inspired by her love of literature and literary romance,
they went way beyond what was considered "proper" for a suburban wife of the
1920s.
She claimed to Bywaters that she had carried out her own abortion after
becoming pregnant by him. She told him of her lack of periods, and of the
orgasm she had experienced when they had open-air sex in Wanstead Park.
And, concealed within at least 51,000 words of other outpourings, were what the
prosecution portrayed as coded requests for Bywaters to kill her 32-year-old
husband.
In one letter she mentioned meeting a woman who had lost 3 husbands. "I can’t
even lose 1," she told her young lover.
She also claimed to Bywaters that she had tried "poisoning" her husband and
putting the glass from a smashed light bulb into his mashed potato.
On 3 October 1922, as Mr and Mrs Thompson walked home from Ilford station in
east London, Bywaters jumped out from behind some bushes and stabbed Percy to
death, as Edith screamed, seemingly hysterically, "no, don't!"
The public lapped up the reports of the subsequent Old Bailey trial.
After the guilty verdict was delivered on December 11, a petition calling for
mercy attracted nearly one million signatures.
But they weren't seeking a reprieve for her. They were after mercy for him -
Bywaters, the man who never denied killing Mr Thompson.
Throughout, Bywaters maintained that he had acted entirely alone. Graham and
Sue Syms and their side of the family are convinced this made the public warm
to the killer as a gentleman who was "chivalrously protecting his lover".
The man who delivered the eulogy at Thursday's service, Professor Rene Weis,
author of Criminal Justice: The True Story of Edith Thompson, wholeheartedly
agrees.
"It goes without saying," he tells you, "That what happened was misogynistic."
Despite having left school at 16, Edith had a natural flair for literature, and
the kind of ability that allowed her to shoulder the responsibility that came
with her job as a buyer for a fashionable hat maker. At the time of the murder,
by contrast, Bywaters was a 20-year-old steward on a P&O liner.
"She was self-evidently more intelligent than him," says Prof Weis,
"Self-evidently more successful, so they thought, wrongly: this woman must be
the driving force in the murder.
"Here was this lower middle class girl from east London," the professor adds.
"Extremely talented, earning a great deal of money - she was smart, she was
elegant, a fantastic dancer.
"For her to behave in ways that would have been fine with the ruling classes,
to have everything ... in the view of the court and in the view of other
people, she got 'above her station'.
"The mood was very hostile to her in a lot of places."
One such place, according to Prof Weis, was in the Old Bailey courtroom, in the
form of 65-year-old trial judge Sir Montague Shearman.
"They called him 'old school' in the 1920s," says Prof Weis. "Essentially, he
was a Victorian. One of his favourite phrases was 'wholesome disgust'.
"The notes he made at the trial have survived. He was against her. When the
court heard how Edith had written about 'great love', he scribbled ‘Great love?
No, unwholesome nonsense.’ "Edith wrote to Freddie Bywaters about her husband,
saying 'He has the right by law to everything you have the right to by nature'
- meaning her - and the judge wrote: 'Nature ... Law ... Wholesome disgust.'"
In addition, says Weis, "the judge didn't know the topography of Ilford. He was
convinced Edith had lured her husband down some dark alley, which was absurd.
They walked down Belgrave Road, which was the widest road in the entire area,
and the only way they could have got home from the station."
And, says Prof Weis, when two eminent doctors conducted an autopsy on the
murdered husband, to see whether Edith really had attempted to poison him or
put ground-up light bulb glass in his mashed potato, “The findings were
categorical: no poison, no light bulb.
"What the Crown thought to be their trump card turned out to be nothing.
Edith's writings about what she had tried to do to her husband were exposed as
the florid fantasies they were."
And yet she was still convicted and sentenced to death.
Unlike most of the congregation on Thursday, Prof Weis is not even a distant
relative of Edith Thompson.
He first became interested in her case in the early 1980s when, to his great
surprise, members of the Thatcher government made it known they were seriously
considering restoring the death penalty.
He began reading up about Timothy Evans, wrongly hanged in 1950 for murders
committed by Rillington Place serial killer John Christie, and about Edith
Thompson, the other person who kept on being mentioned in the debates about the
death penalty.
Prof Weis, whose day job involved researching the works of Shakespeare at
University College London, began reading Edith's surviving letters. He realised
she was "a wonderful writer".
As he said in his eulogy, he believes that had Edith been born 50 years later,
she would have gone to university. Instead, she went to the gallows.
Only after she was dead, did public opinion turn in her favour, and only
because of the gruesome details of her execution.
"The day she was executed," explains Prof Weis, "2 men who had been present
went to the Daily Express and described 'scenes of horror that beggared
belief'. They said her insides fell out, she haemorrhaged on the scaffold.
"Beverley Baxter of the Express took this story to the Home Secretary and said
'Never again must a woman be hanged in Britain'."
Some have taken this, plus the fact that Edith gained a stone in weight despite
eating hardly anything while awaiting execution between 11 December and 9
January, as evidence she was killed while pregnant with Bywaters' child.
Having sought medical opinion, Prof Weis remains uncertain about where the
truth lies on this.
But he is certain that the indignities inflicted on Edith did not end with her
grisly execution.
In 1971, at the start of the rebuild of Holloway, it became necessary to move
the bodies in the condemned prisoners' graveyard.
The body of Edith and four other executed prisoners were removed and taken to
what Prof Weis calls "a mass grave" in Brookwood Cemetery, Surrey.
Advised that it was unlikely any immediate family members were still alive, the
prison authorities did not seek to notify Edith's relatives.
"Morally, albeit not legally, they should have done," says Prof Weis. "But they
didn't bother, and Edith's younger sister Avis Graydon spent the last 7 years
of her life not knowing she could have visited the grave in Brookwood Cemetery.
"She would have given her eye teeth to have known. She adored her sister."
Edith's death did prompt the 1st moves to set up what became the National
Council for the Abolition of the Death Penalty. The group eventually achieved
its aim in the 1960s - after more than four decades, and the deaths of Timothy
Evans, Derek Bentley and Ruth Ellis, to mention the more high profile cases.
Prof Weis' campaign has also taken decades. He published his book about Edith
in 1988.
On Tuesday morning, shortly before dawn, he watched as her mortal remains were
finally lifted out of the mass grave in Brookwood Cemetery.
"When they brought up the body," he says, "We thought ..."
The professor's eyes seem to water and his voice trails off.
He resumes, after a long pause:
"When the ambulance carrying her body moved off, it was almost too much to
bear.
"She was no longer in the place where the Home Office wanted her to be. She was
on the way to where she and her family wanted her to be."
For him, and for the others who saw Edith Thompson finally laid to rest, there
can be no doubt about the moral of her story.
"Edith Thompson," says Prof Weis, "Is one of a number of people whose stories
prove that to return the death penalty to this country would be an act of
barbarism."
(source: independent.co.uk)
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