How the law takes its own course

BRP Bhaskar
Gulf Today

A study on the working of the death penalty has lighted up the tortuous path the law takes and the impact it has on the lives of the poor who get caught in its tentacles.

The pioneering research project undertaken by a group at the National Law University, Delhi, led by Assistant Professor Anup Surendranath, has resulted in the mining of much valuable data on the social and economic aspects of the death penalty and the vagaries of the justice system.

It has also led to the establishment of a Centre on the Death Penalty, whose sphere of activity extends beyond research to litigation and advocacy. At present it represents 40 death row prisoners. Its public affairs team promotes discussion on the death penalty issue outside the realm of law.

Members of the group interviewed 373 of 385 persons in the death row. They also traced family members of the convicts and talked to them. They could not meet 12 condemned prisoners as the authorities denied access to them.

While collecting data, the group noticed several systemic problems that dog the process of criminal investigation and justice delivery. Torture to extort confession was common. Failure to ratify the UN Convention against Torture, which India signed in 1997, virtually sanctions continuance of the medieval practice.

The group found that social and economic factors were at play in the breeding of crime. More than two-fifths of the death row prisoners belonged to socially disadvantaged sections and three-fourths were economically vulnerable. While the Constitution promises equality before law the long and costly process involved effectively denies it to the poor.

Add to it the vagaries of the legal process. The study revealed a wide gap between the approaches of the lowest and highest levels of the judiciary to sentencing. In cases which attract the death penalty less than five per cent of the trial court convictions met with the apex court’s approval. The higher courts set aside the conviction and acquitted the convicts in about 30 per cent of the cases and gave reduced sentences in the remaining cases.

More than 40 years ago the Supreme Court ruled that the death penalty should be awarded only in “the rarest of rare” cases. All too often courts have differed in their assessment of whether or not a case falls in the “rarest of rare” category.

Instances of the same court making conflicting assessments are also on record. A Supreme Court bench sent to the gallows a man who was found guilty of kidnapping a boy for ransom, saying it was a “rarest of rate” case. Earlier it had reduced the death penalty the lower court had awarded to a man who killed his wife and daughter while on parole after being convicted on a charge of raping the daughter, holding the case was not of the “rarest of rare” kind.

The most agonising part of the legal process is the prolonged period of uncertainty through which a death row inmate passes as he awaits the outcome of his plea for mercy. There have been occasions when this period extended beyond two decades. It is a period of acute mental stress as he remains trapped between hope and death.

While the Supreme Court has upheld the constitutional validity of the death penalty, the Law Commission, in a report last September, broke with past recommendations and proposed that the country move towards restricting its use to terrorism cases, where it was necessary for reasons of national security.

The growing national movement for abolition of the death penalty suffered a setback two years ago when the national outrage over a gang rape in Delhi prompted the government to toughen the law relating to grave sexual offences.

In justification of its new recommendation, the Law Commission pointed out that the murder rate had fallen from 4.6 per 100,000 people in 1992 to 2.7 per 100,000 in 2013. The rate of executions too had declined. National Crime Records Bureau’s figures indicated that the average number of persons sentenced to death now stood at 129 a year.

The police forces’ bias against the minorities is well-known. The rise of terrorism has led to the spread of prejudice to other sections too. In confirming the death penalty awarded to Afzal Guru, one of the accused in the Parliament attack case, the Supreme Court had observed that “the collective conscience of the society will only be satisfied if the capital punishment is awarded to the offender”. Many have taken exception to this observation, viewing it as proof of deviation from the standard judicial approach.  -- Gulf Today, Sharjah, May 10, 2016.

Vengeance in garb of justice

BRP Bhaskar
Gulf Today

The hanging of Mumbai serial blasts convict Yakub Memon last week has brought to the fore the issue of administration of justice, with particular reference to use of the death penalty.

“Ultimately, justice has been delivered to all the victims of the 1993 Mumbai blasts,” said Bharatiya Janata Party Secretary Shrikant Sharma. Congress party spokesman PC Chacko echoed his sentiments but added “full justice” would come only when Tiger Memon and Dawood Ibrahim, the prime accused, were punished.

“Justice according to law has been done,” said former Supreme Court judge BN Srikrishna, revealing an understanding of the concept of justice which was missing in the politicians’ comments. The cases relating to the blasts and those relating to the communal riots that occurred earlier were “dealt with disparately, depending on the communal inclinations of the state apparatus,” he added.

Justice Srikrishna who held a judicial inquiry into the riots had found a causative link between the two events. The Memon family had suffered extensive damage in the riots.

The justice-has-been-done refrain of the ruling BJP and the opposition Congress seeks to camouflage the cycle of violence and vengeance of the past quarter century in which the former was an active participant, along with its Hindutva ally Shiv Sena, and the latter was an ex post facto accessory.

The chain of events started with the demolition of Babri Masjid at Ayodhya in Uttar Pradesh by Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh cadres on December 6, 1992 in the presence of BJP chief LK Advani.

Justice Srikrishna said a spontaneous peaceful protest by incensed and leaderless Muslims in Mumbai quickly degenerated into riots. He attributed part of the blame to the provocative slogans raised at celebratory rallies organised by Shiv Sena and BJP. Later, Hindu mobs, influenced by the communal propaganda of Shiv Sena leaders, including its supremo Bal Thackeray, resorted to large-scale violence. 

Sudhakarrao Naik of the Congress was the Chief Minister when the riots broke out. The blasts occurred after Sharad Pawar took over from him.

When the SS-BJP combine came to power, the government disbanded the Srikrishna Commission. BJP Prime Minister AB Vajpayee asked the SS Chief Minister to reinstate it.

The riots and police firings to quell them left 900 dead. Of them, 575 were Muslims and 275 Hindus. While in power neither the SS-BJP combine nor the Congress pursued the riot cases vigorously.

In the only riot case that resulted in conviction, three SS men, including Madhukar Sarpotdar, MP, were given one year’s rigorous imprisonment. Sarpotdar was immediately granted bail and died two years later without going to prison.

The 13 explosions left 257 dead and more than 700 injured. Damage to property was estimated at Rs 300 million. The prosecution said the blasts were plotted by underworld don Dawood Ibrahim and carried out by his associates including Tiger Memon.

The entire Memon family slipped out of Mumbai to Karachi, where Dawood is believed to be living under ISI protection. Tiger’s brother Yakub returned later, professing innocence, and provided the authorities with information on the roles of Dawood, Tiger and the ISI.

Members of all communities suffered in both the riots and the blasts. The media identified blast victims of one community who kept asking for justice. No riot victims of any community were paraded. Thus, in public discourse, justice became synonymous with vengeance.

In 2006, the trial court awarded the death penalty to 12 persons, including Yakub. As the case moved to higher courts, the others got relief and Yakub became the only one to be hanged.

Yakub’s final hours were marked by high drama with three Supreme Court judges sitting twice, the last time around 4am, three hours before the time set by the trial court for his hanging, to dispose of petitions filed by him or by others, including some eminent citizens, on his behalf. They really did not have to go without sleep. They could have followed the standards practice of staying the execution until the petitions were disposed of.

Unable to view the last acts of the drama as triumph of the rule of law, Anup Surendranath, Deputy Registrar (Research) at the Supreme Court quit the job to focus on the Death Penalty Research Project at the National Law University, of which he is the Director.

Why did the apex court judges feel so bound by the time-frame set by the lower court that they sacrificed sleep to honour it? There is no ready answer to the question. -- Gulf Today, August 4, 2015.