India: Death penalty debate won't die out
soon By Raju Bist
MUMBAI -
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.
Raju Bist is a Mumbai-based freelance
journalist. He can be contacted atinwo@rediffmail.com.
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