Execution Ends Moratorium on Death Penalty; Hanging Erodes Pakistan's Most Tangible Human Rights Success

After a 4-year unofficial moratorium, Pakistan has reverted to the odious practice of sending people to the gallows. Instead, the government should declare an official moratorium, commute all existing death sentences, and then abolish the death penalty for all crimes once and for all.

The Pakistani government should reinstate its moratorium on the death penalty following its troubling return to the dwindling ranks of countries imposing capital punishment. On November 15, 2012, military authorities hanged Muhammad Hussain, an army soldier convicted of murder, at Mianwali jail in Punjab province.

The hanging ended Pakistan's widely hailed unofficial moratorium on the death penalty that had been in place since 2008, Human Rights Watch said. According to official figures, Pakistan has more than 7,000 prisoners on death row, one of the largest populations of prisoners facing execution in the world.

"After a 4-year unofficial moratorium, Pakistan has reverted to the odious practice of sending people to the gallows," said Ali Dayan Hasan, Pakistan director at Human Rights Watch. "Instead, the government should declare an official moratorium, commute all existing death sentences, and then abolish the death penalty for all crimes once and for all."

On February 12, 2009, a court martial in Okara Cantonment sentenced Hussain to death for murdering his superior, Havaldar Khadim Hussain, in 2008. He subsequently filed mercy petitions to the army's General Headquarters and the chief of army staff, Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, but they were rejected. Hussain's final mercy petition to President Asif Ali Zardari was rejected on December 30, 2011.

The Pakistani government is sending mixed messages about the death penalty, Human Rights Watch said. On November 2, Zardari's spokesperson, Farhatullah Babar, had told the media that the government has been "considering converting death sentences into life imprisonment and is taking appropriate legislative measures for the purpose."

The governing Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) has repeatedly stated that it is opposed to the death penalty. The PPP's founder and former prime minister, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, was hanged by military authorities on trumped-up charges in 1979.

Human Rights Watch wrote to Prime Minister Yusuf Raza Gilani in June 2008 and met with him the following month urging action to abolish the death penalty and to impose a moratorium pending abolition. Soon after military ruler Gen. Pervez Musharraf was ousted from office in August 2008, the government imposed a de facto moratorium on judicial executions.

Government officials speaking on condition of anonymity told Human Rights Watch that Hussain's execution had been carried out under pressure from military authorities as Husain had been convicted by a military rather than a civilian court.

While under military rule, Pakistan each year executed among the highest number of people of any country. For example, according to Amnesty International, in 2005 Pakistan sentenced more than 241 people to death and executed at least 31, the 5th highest total in the world.

Human Rights Watch opposes the death penalty in all circumstances as an inherently irreversible, inhumane punishment. A majority of countries in the world have abolished the practice. On December 18, 2007, the United Nations General Assembly passed a resolution by a wide margin calling for a worldwide moratorium on executions.

"Hussain's execution derails one of the Pakistani government's most tangible human rights successes," Hasan said. "It is essential the government demonstrate that this execution was an aberration rather than a return to the widespread application of the death penalty under military rule."

Source: Human Rights Watch, November 22, 2012

California | Becerra vows to extend moratorium despite past support for capital punishment

SACRAMENTO—Democrat Xavier Becerra defended the death penalty while serving as California’s attorney general, a punishment his office actively sought in the case of a gunman convicted of an Orange County mass shooting, but as the front-running candidate for governor, he has vowed to block executions if elected in November. Becerra said he will extend the blanket reprieve for all death row inmates that Gov. Gavin Newsom enacted by executive order in 2019, saying he supported “moving our state away from a costly, flawed system that disproportionately impacts Black and brown communities and too often gets it wrong.”

Iran | Afghan Citizen Executed in Wheelchair Due to Severe Mobility Disability

KABUL, AFGHANISTAN – Iranian authorities have reportedly executed an Afghan citizen, identified as Valijan Nourzay, at the central prison in Rafsanjan, according to the human rights organization Hengaw. Hengaw said in a statement on Sunday, September 6, that Nourzay was executed early Wednesday last week at Rafsanjan Central Prison. According to the organization, Nourzay had a severe mobility disability and was executed while in a wheelchair. Hengaw, citing informed sources, reported that Nourzay had been pursued by Iranian authorities three years ago over an alleged murder. He was reportedly seriously wounded after Iranian security forces opened fire on him in Rafsanjan before being arrested and later sentenced to death.

Egypt TV presenter and 11 others sentenced to death in major drugs case

Egyptian television presenter Sarah Khalifa and 11 others have been sentenced to death by hanging after being convicted of drug trafficking and rape, while nine defendants received life sentences and seven were acquitted. Egyptian television presenter Sarah Khalifa, 39, has been sentenced to death by hanging along with 11 other defendants after being found guilty in a drugs case involving a criminal gang accused of importing ingredients used to manufacture narcotics for sale.

He Spent 27 Years on Death Row as a Wrongfully Convicted Man. What Comes Next?

23-hour solitary confinement. 115-degree heat. Jimmie Duncan is haunted by the decades he spent in Louisiana’s Angola Prison—and how, even after being released, he still isn’t truly free. Jimmie “Chris” Duncan wiped the sweat off his forehead as he assessed his temporary home from the parking lot of a rundown motel in central Louisiana. Sure, there’s drug dealing and prostitution, he said on a recent summer afternoon. And he suspected his neighbors were cooking meth on a floor below the room he paid $350 a week to rent.

California | He spent 19 years on death row. His conversion to Judaism helped him endure

Johnny Morales struggled to find sleep. He dozed off for a few moments, but officers came to his death row cell and woke him a little after midnight. They needed to inventory and box up his belongings. He was leaving San Quentin. Hands cuffed behind his back, he walked across the empty upper yard in the dim gray hours before daylight. An officer walked alongside him step for step, black latex-gloved fingers holding onto Morales’s arm. For almost 20 years, Morales could only experience the world outside his 4-by-11 foot cell in the condemned housing unit like this—chained and escorted by officers. Security protocols required all death row residents be handcuffed or shackled any time they were out in open space with staff.

Ex-corrections officials urge governor to commute Kansas death sentences

Former Kansas corrections officials are urging Governor Laura Kelly to grant clemency to the state's death row inmates. Former Kansas Corrections Secretary Roger Werholtz has several reasons why he thinks the state should abolish the death penalty. Werholtz, who served as secretary from 2002 to 2010 and returned on an interim basis in 2019, uses his discussions with peers and family members of victims as well as experiences of seeing wrongly convicted people getting exonerated as his guiding points.

Florida executes Harold Gene Lucas

Florida state officials executed 74-year-old Harold Gene Lucas by lethal injection on Tuesday evening, concluding a 50-year legal saga stemming from the 1976 murder of a 16-year-old girl in Bonita Springs. STARKE, Fla. -- A man convicted of killing a teenage girl who rejected his romantic advances and wounding two of her friends was put to death Tuesday in the first of three executions planned this month in Florida. Harold Gene Lucas, 74, was pronounced dead at 6:18 p.m. following a three-drug injection at Florida State Prison near Starke, authorities said. He was sentenced to death for the 1976 shooting attack on Jill Piper and the wounding of her friends, Richard Byrd Jr. and Terri Rice.

Florida set to carry out 14th execution this year in the nation's busiest death chamber

MIAMI (AP) — A Florida man convicted of fatally shooting a 16-year-old girl who rejected his romantic advances and wounding two of her friends is set to be executed Tuesday in the first of three lethal injections scheduled this month in the state. Harold Gene Lucas, 74, is set to receive a three-drug injection at Florida State Prison near Starke starting at 6 p.m. He would be the 14th prisoner put to death this year in Florida, and Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis has already signed death warrants for two more executions set for later this September.

Arizona AG seeks execution date for man convicted in 1995 trooper killing

Trooper Bob Martin was killed during a traffic stop on the Beeline highway; execution for his killer could be as soon as January PHOENIX (AZFamily)—The Arizona Attorney General is asking for an execution date to be set for a man convicted in the killing of an Arizona State Trooper over 30 years ago. On Aug. 15, 1995, Trooper Bob Martin was shot and killed while performing a traffic stop along the Beeline Highway.

Hanging, confinement and the sentencing debate India won’t have

Ask anybody what a “death sentence” in India actually means, and the honest answer is that it can mean three quite different things. It can mean the noose—hanging by the neck until death; it can mean permanent confinement in jail—a term the courts now call imprisonment for the remainder of one’s natural life, and, far more often than either of the first two, it can simply mean delay in delivery of justice—a death sentence that is neither carried out nor commuted, waiting for completion of investigation, trial before the sessions court, hearing of a confirmation proceeding in a high court, appeal against conviction in the Supreme Court, or hearing of a mercy petition nobody has decided for years, sometimes for decades, until age or illness does what the state never got around to doing itself.

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