An inmate who released a video clip from jail pleading with the public to help him escape the death penalty may be able to get his sentence commuted to life imprisonment, a lawyer said.
Syed Iskandar Syed Jaafar Al Mahdzar said B Anand Nambiar could file a review in the Federal Court or a judicial review in a high court on grounds that keeping him in solitary confinement is a severe punishment.
“He could file a motion in the Federal Court that keeping him on the death row for a long time is harsh and an unusual sentence,” Syed Iskandar told FMT.
Anand, who is an inmate at the Pengkalan Chepa prison in Kelantan, was charged alongside 3 others under Section 302 of the Penal Code.
The 4 were sentenced to death by hanging. They were also separately sentenced to 20 years’ jail for attempting to murder Heng’s friend, Chong Chiew Nam. The Federal Court upheld the decision in 2015.
Syed Iskandar said Anand could also file for a judicial review and seek an order of mandamus to order the government to substitute the death penalty to a jail term.
He said lawyers from the Kelantan Bar could assist Anand to file the legal papers.
Syed Iskandar cited the case of Nigerian Michael Philip Spears, who escaped the gallows after the Pardons Board in 2017 commuted his death sentence to natural life imprisonment.
Spears, who spent 20 years in jail – the last 16 in solitary confinement – was convicted for murder.
The government did not contest the suit in the Federal Court after a Court of Appeal in 2016 ordered the Nigerian’s complaint be heard before a High Court judge.
Spears’ lawyer, Azreen Ahmad Rastom, then told FMT that the prisons authorities informed her that the Pardons Board had substituted the capital punishment to life imprisonment.
The Nigerian in his suit filed against the government, argued that his long detention and delay in carrying out the hanging was cruel, inhuman and a degrading punishment.
Then Court of Appeal judge Varghese George, who delivered the 19-page judgment, said being on death row did not deny Spears his constitutional rights
Source: freemalaysiatoday.com, Staff, September 10, 2019
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"One is absolutely sickened, not by the crimes that the wicked have committed,
but by the punishments that the good have inflicted." -- Oscar Wilde
