The government has been urged to work with the Pardons Board to ensure that more 1,300 convicts on death row are spared the death penalty.
The Malaysian Bar made the call following Minister in the Prime Minister's Department (Law and Institutional Reform) Datuk Seri Azalina Othman's statement last month that the government would amend laws that carried a mandatory death sentence, to allow for alternative sentencing.
FMT reported bar president Karen Cheah as saying today that these prisoners should not be allowed to feel uncertain of their fate. There is a moratorium on the execution of death row inmates.
"It is an inhumane way of treating convicts on death row," she said after the opening of the 2023 legal year at Putrajaya International Conventional Centre near here today.
Cheah said Malaysia must shift away from killing people in the name of justice in order for the country to progress democratically.
"We, therefore, welcome the announcement that the mandatory death penalty will be done away with in respect to 11 offences carrying such sentences, with the discretion in sentencing returning to the unfettered domain of the judiciary," she said.
Cheah said the death penalty was cruel and degrading and that it breached the rights to life and to live free from torture.
"The irreversible, irreparable and non-deterrent nature of the death penalty should in and of itself be sufficient (reason) to abolish the death penalty," she said.
On another matter, Cheah said the National Legal Aid Foundation had assisted 222,361 people as of November last year. The foundation was established in 2012, with the government providing RM5 million to start the programme.
She said lawyers assisted the poor and needy in cases involving arrests, remands, mitigation, bail, trials and appeals under the scheme.
"Access to justice is the hallmark of a strong presence of the rule of law in the country," she said.
Source: nst.com.my, Staff, January 9, 2023
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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
