Month: April 2020

29 years on death row, Pakistan woman suffers mental illness

29 years on death row, Pakistan woman suffers mental illness

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KATHY GANNON Associated Press 10 April 2020

FILE – In this July 8, 2006 file photo, women prisoners celebrate the news of their release on bail, at Adiala Jail in Rawalpindi, Pakistan. Kanizan Bibi, charged with murdering her employer’s wife and five children, remains a prisoner on death row for the last 29 years. She’s one of more than 600 mentally ill prisoners in Pakistan’s overcrowded prisons. (AP Photo/Anjum Naveed,file)

ISLAMABAD (AP) — Kanizan Bibi was 16 when she was charged with murdering her employer’s wife and five children. The police said she was having an affair with her employer, who was also arrested and later hanged.

Until his execution in 2003, Khan Mohammad swore he and Bibi had never had an affair and had not killed anyone. He maintained his wife and children were killed as payback in a long-running land dispute with his relatives.

Yet Bibi, who was diagnosed with schizophrenia in 2000, remains on death row, where she has been for 29 years.

The Cornell Center on the Death Penalty Worldwide is spearheading efforts along with the independent Justice Project Pakistan to get Bibi released. But the coronavirus pandemic that has shut down most of Pakistan seems to have also shut down Bibi’s chance at freedom.

She’s one of more than 600 mentally ill prisoners in Pakistan’s overcrowded prisons. A March 30 hearing to present yet another psychiatric evaluation was postponed when courts closed.

Most days Bibi can barely dress herself. She hasn’t spoken in more than a decade and her father, before he died in 2016 pleaded in a letter to Pakistan’s president to free his only child.

“My daughter was accused of murder, which was a lie,” he wrote telling of how she was tortured in police custody.

“They hung her from a fan with ropes thicker than her tiny wrists, beating her small frame with all their might. They let mice loose in her pants, which they tied from the ankles so that they could not escape. Kanizan had been terrified of mice her whole life,” he wrote. “I am a poor man and I beg that the death sentence of my daughter be converted into life in prison.”

He never received a reply.

Justice Project Pakistan this week warned of a steep rise in COVID-19 cases in Pakistan’s crowded jails. The Supreme Court of Pakistan this week agreed to release some mentally ill and disabled prisoners to ease conditions, but only those whose sentences are less than three years.

That meant Bibi had to remain in prison.

A land dispute between relatives was at the center of her case. Her employer’s cousins had been feuding with him over land and had originally been arrested for the murders. They pointed to Bibi and accused her of adultery, a crime of shame in conservative Pakistan, saying that’s why she killed her employer’s wife and children. In villages adultery can bring summary executions by family members.

Bibi was accused of involvement in the killings and charged with murder. Unsubstantiated adultery claims and a confession elicited after days of torture were enough for the judge to sentence her to death.

Delphine Lourtau, who heads the Cornell Center on Death Penalty Worldwide said the group’s research showed that women often aren’t just punished for crimes they are being charged with “but also for transgressing gender norms.”

Lourtau said three decades on death row have taken a severe toll on Bibi.

“She has lost touch with reality and is oblivious to her surroundings. There are days when she is unable to eat or dress herself. She trembles, hears voices, and is rarely able to recognize family members,” the Cornell Center said.

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This story has been corrected to show that the employer’s name was Khan Mohammad, not Sher Mohammad. – Yahoo News, 10/4/2020

Bangladesh – Execution during Covid-Pandemic

Bangladesh – Execution during Covid-Pandemic

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Bangladesh Hangs Sheikh Mujibur Rahman’s Killer Abdul Majed on Sunday(12/4/2020) during the Covid pandemic – see news report below.

Capital punishment in South Asia amidst Covid-19

Professor Pritam Singh

April 12, 2020

The three major South Asian countries – India, Pakistan and Bangladesh – may pretend to be very different from each other or might even have some geo-political tensions between them but all three share one obnoxious cultural and social similarity that there is almost a public consensus in the three countries on having capital punishment or death penalty for some crimes in their legal systems.

Last month, four men who were found guilty of the horrific rape crime in Delhi in 2012 were hanged to death in a Delhi prison. It has been recently reported that in Bangladesh, the President of the country has rejected the mercy plea of Abdul Majed who has been sentenced to death for his involvement in a military coup in 1975 in which Sheikh Mujibur Rehman, the founder of Bangladesh, was assassinated. With this last hurdle removed for his hanging, Mr Majed is likely to be executed very soon.

Given the widespread cultural acceptance of the death penalty in India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, raising objection to capital punishment may seem unacceptable but with the exceptional circumstances of the Covid-19 when human beings are being killed in thousands all over the world, it is worth considering whether these legal killings have any meaning. Should human beings be killing other human beings whether through wars, border conflicts, terrorist actions, ‘encounter’ killings, sectarian massacres, armed insurgencies and counterinsurgencies, lynchings or death penalties when the whole of humanity is collectively under threat from this terrible virus? All these different forms of human beings killing other human beings seem to lose all significance in the context of the coronavirus threat.

Those who favour retention of death penalty consider that this acts as a deterrence against heinous crimes. Bringing a legal change as was done in India after that horrific rape in 2012 to make the rape crime punishable by capital punishment has not acted as a deterrence against rape crime in India. According to one estimate, women are still raped in India at the rate of one every twenty minutes. The historical experience from all over the world shows that capital punishment has nowhere acted as a deterrence against any activity which is made punishable by the death penalty. It does not make any difference whether the execution takes place through hanging as done in India, Pakistan and Bangladesh or a lethal injection in jail as one of the methods used in the US or beheading in Saudi Arabia, to take a few examples.

Life imprisonment is a better course of action than the death penalty for those rare crimes for which capital punishment still exists in the legal system. Life imprisonment keeps the possibility open for repentance by the guilty and perhaps to gain better understanding of the nature of their crime. This may result in developing more informed ways to deal with that crime. There are examples in history where hardened criminals during their incarceration repent for what they have done and go through total transformation. Capital punishment puts an end to this possibility. Jailing for life allows the possibility for reformation.

It is also worth keeping in mind that there are examples where it emerges after the execution that the person executed did not deserve to be executed. The recent ongoing revelations about the activities of the Kashmir police official Davinder Singh raise serious doubts about whether Afzal Guru, who was executed in 2013 really was guilty of what he was accused of. There have been doubts also about whether Kehar Singh’s role in Indira Gandhi’s assassination in 1984 by her security guards Beant Singh and Satwant Singh was such that it deserved the death penalty.READ MORE: Confirmed coronavirus cases in Pakistan reach 5,374

Execution is an irreversible act. Life imprisonment opens the possibility of reversing the judgement if later evidence is found that the basis of the earlier judgement was flawed. There is the famous Birmingham Six case in the UK where six men, all Roman Catholics from Northern Ireland, were sentenced in 1975 to life imprisonment for what was claimed by the prosecution as their participation in Birmingham pub bombings in 1974 which had resulted in 21 deaths. The prosecution had claimed that the bombings by the six men were organised by the Irish Republican Army, the paramilitary organisation that had been carrying an armed campaign to end British rule in Northern Ireland and to unite both parts of Ireland to create a united independent Ireland. The Court of Appeal in 1991 quashed their conviction and all six were set free. Had they been executed in 1975 instead of imprisoning them, a terrible act of injustice would have taken place. The six men were later awarded compensation ranging from £840,000 to £1.2 million for all the suffering they had gone through for having been falsely implicated and imprisoned for 17 years.

Another consideration, apart from the fact that capital punishment has never acted as a deterrence for acts such as rape and murder, is the effect on those who have to administer it. In this context, a friend of mine has brought to my notice the work of the famous British barrister, novelist and playwright John Mortimer. Mortimer had acquired special fame in dealing with divorce cases and he recalled one case he had dealt with in which it came to light that the male party, whose sexual predilections were unspeakably gross, was a part-time hangman. Mortimer reflecting on this case had remarked that if the system of capital punishment relied on monsters like that administering it, there must be something wrong with the system. John Mortimer was a lifelong opponent of capital punishment. Apart from the hangmen, all others who are involved in the act of execution suffer everlasting psychological damages with harmful and multiplier implications for everyone in their lives.

The death sentence leads to complacency in society by cloaking over the underlying responsibilities that society has for dealing with the causes that lead to serious crimes.

According to Amnesty International, which campaigns worldwide for abolishing the death penalty, at the end of 2018, 106 countries had abolished the death penalty in law for all crimes, and 142 countries constituting more than two-thirds of all the countries in the world, had abolished the death penalty in law or practice. Of the 56 countries that still retain the death penalty law, an overwhelming majority are from Asia, Africa and Latin America. Among the developed countries, only USA and Japan have the death penalty, and even there the public opinion is moving in the direction of opposition to death penalty. It is time that India, Pakistan and Bangladesh also move in this direction of doing away with the death penalty. As we are passing through an exceptional period of loss of lives due to the coronavirus pandemic, the heightened importance of saving lives and not ending them may trigger a cultural change in these three South Asian countries in favour of abolishing the death penalty law.

The writer is Visiting Scholar, Wolfson College, University of Oxford, UK.

Those who favour retention of death penalty consider that this acts as a deterrence against heinous crimes. – The Nation, 12/4/2020

Statement on the Health and Safety of Prisoners During the COVID-19 Pandemic

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Statement on the Health and Safety of Prisoners During the COVID-19 Pandemic

April 9, 2020, Statements

As the global population grapples with the impact of the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic, the  Anti-Death Penalty Asia Network (ADPAN) reminds Governments in the Asia Pacific and  around the world of their obligations to ensure that prison conditions won’t facilitate the  spread of the disease for the safety of prisoners, staff and visitors.  

It is well documented that prisons in many countries across the world are overpopulated.  Prisons in some jurisdictions are also known for their failure to provide a hygienic  environment and in some cases, adequate medical care especially for inmates on death row.  Such neglect can have huge implications on the health and safety of prisoners who face a high  risk of infection if prisons become epicenters of this fatal disease.  

We support the call of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Michelle Bachelet for  States to adhere to their obligations under international human rights law “to work to prevent  foreseeable threats to public health and ensure that all who need vital medical care can  receive it”.  

Therefore we call for the following actions: 

  • All scheduled executions be immediately halted given the lack of access to lawyers,  family members and Court review resulting from Covid-19 restrictions; 
  • That States ensure all prisoners including those on death row are provided the UN  Standard Minimum Rules for the Treatment of Prisoners (also known as the ‘Nelson  Mandela Rules’); 
  • That the State ensures prisons implement the ‘Interim Guidance: Covid-19 Focus on  Persons Deprived of their liberty’ produced by the OHCHR and WHO (27 March 2020)  to ensure that prisons provide all the necessary health and hygiene provisions  required to protect prisoners, staff and visitors from the spread of infection; 
  • That prisons report transparently on the exact measures they have taken to ensure  the health and safety of prisoners in accordance with the ‘Interim Guidance: Covid-19  Focus on Persons Deprived of their liberty’; 
  • That appropriate measures are taken to provide immediate treatment and complete  isolation to those diagnosed positive with Covid-19 or displaying symptoms consistent  with Covid-19, and immediate isolation for those in any way in contact with the  affected prisoners;  
  • Consideration be given to early release of elderly prisoners and prisoners with  underlying health conditions and the granting of bail to prisoners awaiting trial to  reduce the overcrowding in jails given the need for physical distancing to control the  spread of Covid-19; and 
  •  That any restrictions on visits to prisons be imposed with full transparency and  balanced with increased access to phone calls and letters with family member.
Statement on the Health and Safety of Prisoners During the COVID-19 Pandemic
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