Death Penalty News

The authorities at the Prison Department, however, said that there will be ample time to arrange a scaffold as and when required. After a fast track court in Asifabad district recently awarded capital punishment to three convicts in the Samatha rape case, the question of lack of a gallows to implement the capital punishment has come to the fore once again.  It is a known fact that there are no gallows in the State to hang the convicts who were issued a death warrant. The authorities at the Prison Department, however, said that there will be ample time to arrange a scaffold as and when required.  However, it is not easy for authorities to set up gallows in a short span of time and execute punishment, as they have to go through a myriad number of procedures before hanging a convict.  For instance, punishment executor (hangmen) has to undergo adequate training and practise on dummies.  The ‘Model Prison Manual for The Superintendence and Manag...

There has been a trend among death row convicts to get their execution delayed through appeals and curative petitions. What are the legal loopholes that allow them to prolong their sentences despite the chief justice saying it is extremely important in such cases to have finality? Court verdicts, technically, settle the rights and liabilities of all parties in a case. Of late, however, courts are witnessing multiple challenges to all kinds of verdicts. Even death row convicts, believing their sentence to be open-ended, continue to file a variety of pleas in an attempt to escape the gallows. A rather piquant situation was seen recently when the Supreme Court dismissed the plea of Nirbhaya death row convict Mukesh Kumar who challenged the rejection of his mercy petition by President Ram Nath Kovind. The Court said there was no merit in the contention. “Alleged sufferings in jail can’t be grounds to challenge the rejection of mercy plea by President,” the Court said. Expedi...

No new date for the execution of the four death row inmates in the Nirbhaya rape and murder case has been issued yet. New Delhi: None of the Nirbhaya rape and murder convicts will be hanged on Saturday, a Delhi court has ruled, indefinitely postponing the execution of their death warrant after the inmates sought a stay on their hanging scheduled for 6 am on February 1. No new date for the execution of the four death row inmates has been issued yet. Additional Sessions Judge Dharmender Rana earlier on Friday heard the arguments of Tihar Jail authorities and the convicts' lawyer. Challenging the application of three inmates seeing a stay on the execution, Tihar authorities had told the court that only one convict's mercy plea is pending and the others can be hanged. The convicts' lawyer disagreed with the jail authorities and said rules dictate that when one convict's plea is pending, the others cannot be hanged. While passing the order, Rana took n...

Human Rights Watch says Singapore is extremely secretive about how many executions it carries out Singapore has used its controversial 'fake news' legislation to try to suppress claims that death row prisoners are sometimes kicked to death to ensure their necks snap during botched hangings. A former executioner at Singapore's Changi Prison has alleged that he and other prison officers were secretly ordered to kick the back of the neck repeatedly if a prisoner did not die from the gallows. The man — who remains anonymous — recently told a Malaysian human rights group that prison officers were given special training to carry out the execution method. "He and other prison officers were instructed to carry out the brutal procedure whenever the rope breaks during a hanging, which happens from time to time," the group Lawyers for Liberty (LFL) said in a statement. The group said if a hanging fails to kill a prisoner on death row, officers are quie...

Delhi court Monday dismissed a plea filed by the father of one of the four death row convicts in the Nirbhaya gang rape and murder case, challenging the court's order rejecting his complaint questioning the credibility of the sole witness in the case. Judge A K Jain dismissed the appeal filed by Heera Lal Gupta, father of Pawan Kumar Gupta, saying he appear to be "desperate and mala fide". The court however took into account that his son is one step away from the gallows and did not impose any cost on him. It said: "The complaint was filed before the trial court for initiation of action for perjury, in view of the tweets of newspaper editor, against the eye witness in the case, however trial has already completed. The complaint therefore rightly dismissed by the trial court via order dated January 6, 2020. "The acts of complainant who is the father of convict Pawan Kumar Gupta appear desperate and mala fide, however when his son is one step aw...

In the basement of St. Paul's Ramsey County Jail 114 years ago next month, a trap door swung open and convicted killer William Williams, a rope cinched around his neck, fell through. The state of Minnesota was carrying out its 66th execution. And its last — unsurprisingly, considering how it turned out. Williams had been found guilty of shooting to death a teenaged boy and the boy's mother. A county trial judge had ordered him “hanged by the neck until dead.” After Williams plummeted, spectators gasped. Then one shouted, “He's on the floor!” Sure enough. Sheriff Anton Miesen, who had attended a dinner party before the execution, had miscalculated the length of the rope. Williams' feet had indeed hit the ground and touched. “(His) neck stretched four and one half inches and the rope nearly eight inches,” the St. Paul Daily News reported in spite of a state law at the time that prohibiting the publication of details of executions. Three sheriff'...

President Ram Nath Kovind today rejected the mercy plea of Nirbhaya case convict, Mukesh Singh, hours after the Union home ministry forwarded it to the President with the recommendation to turn down the petition. The President’s decision exhausts all the possibilities of Mukesh Singh escaping the gallows. Later, the ministry wrote to the Delhi government, conveying that the President in exercise of the powers under Article 72 of the Constitution has rejected the mercy plea of Mukesh Singh, who is now lodged in a special cell in the national capital’s Tihar jail. Under Article 72, the President can grant a pardon or reduce the sentence of a convicted person, particularly in cases involving capital punishment. A Delhi court had yesterday made it clear that the scheduled execution of the the convicts – Mukesh Singh, Vinay Sharma, Akshay Singh and Pawan Gupta – could not be carried out January 22, 2020. Additional Sessions Judge Satish Kumar Arora had said...

Georgia has been executing condemned prisoners since before the nation’s founding. The first person put to death was Alice Riley, who was hanged in Savannah on Jan. 19, 1734. An indentured Irish servant who protested her innocence until the end, she was charged with participating in the murder of William Wise. Riley was pregnant at the time of her sentencing and allowed a temporary stay. She was executed 4 weeks after her child was born, according to GeorgiaInfo, an online almanac hosted by GALILEO and the University of Georgia Libraries. The state’s legacy of slavery is intertwined with its laws regarding the death penalty. In 1863, for example, state law at the time held that white people who incited slave revolts or even tried to could face execution. By 1865, race-based death penalty statutes had been eliminated. Condemned prisoners generally faced the gallows until the 1920s, although the state also used firing squads and at least two prisoners were burned at the st...

Anyone who commits heinous crimes like the Nirbhaya case deserves to be hanged, says Pawan Jallad, an executioner from Meerut. 5 years after '93 Mumbai blasts convict Yakub Memon was executed, India will again witness the use of capital punishment on January 22, when the four convicts of the 2012 Nirbhaya gangrape and murder case will be hanged. RELATED | India: Dummy Execution Of Four Death-Row Convicts In Nirbhaya Gangrape Case Held In Tihar And Pawan will be their executioner. Who is Pawan Jallad? Pawan, 58, was born as Sindhi Ram into a family of executioners, according to The Statesman. His father, Mammu Jallad, grandfather, Kaluram Jallad, and great-grandfather, Lakshman Jallad, were all executioners. Pawan told IANS that he first hanged 2 brothers when he was aged 20-22. He carried out the execution with his grandfather at Patiala Central Jail. Since then, he has performed 4 other executions. Pawan said his family has conducted many pro...