Four inmates awaiting execution in Indian jails

New Delhi, November 2, 2006. - The death sentence this week of a Delhi lawyer, who murdered ten years ago a young woman after raping her, has opened a sharp debate on capital punishment in India, whose prisons were estimated that 400 prisoners waiting to be hanged.
The Delhi High Court ruled on 30 October to Santosh Singh, 35, to death by hanging for the murder and rape of the young student Priyadarshini Matoo, 23, whom he had been harassed for two years.
Singh, married and father of a young daughter, had been freed from the burden of the law when he was tried in 1999 for the first time of that offense, and acquitted for lack of evidence, a verdict that raised social controversy and criticism in the media communication.
The Indian Justice applies the death penalty following the "rarest of the rare" ("the rarest of the rare"), an example of which would be the 1989 assassination of President Indira Gandhi assassination, the author paid with death.
This principle covers usually brutal crimes such as murder after a rape or high treason against the state, but the problem is that the Supreme Court not criminalized at the time what crime was "weird" and what "the rarest" of So in the end to death sentences are discretionary.
For Santosh, the judges felt no doubt that the accused, the son of a policeman and a lawyer, should have had an "exemplary", yet harassed his victim for two years, which ended up breaking and killing after assault at home.
But this sentence has driven a wedge between those who advocate the extension of the death penalty in more cases and those calling for a moratorium on executions until the total abolition, including the delegate from India Amnesty International (AI), Soumya Bhaumik.
"There are people who are against the death penalty, but justified the executions in the extreme cases of rape and murder. We have to do education, everyone should understand that the death penalty is not the way ", said Bhaumik Efe.
According to the CEO of AI, there is a growing risk that the public identifies justice with the death penalty, partly because "the insane role of media, playing with the feelings of people ignoring the fact that an execution violates the basic human rights. "
India seemed to have been slow but progressive steps towards abolition of the death penalty since, in 1973, established the obligation of reason in each statement the reasons why they decided the death sentence rather than life imprisonment.
In the early 60's last century, according to estimates by AI, there had been about 1,450 executions in this country.
But the Indian state has recognized only 45 executions since independence in 1947 until 2004, according Baumik.
For AI delegate, step backwards in the fight for the abolition of capital punishment was in 2004 when Dhananjoy Chatterjee was executed, also convicted for the rape and murder of a woman.
That run broke "a moratorium of 15 years," applied after the murderer of President Gandhi, presented Baumik.
And now it is estimated that about a dozen cases awaiting the signature of the Indian President Abdul Kalam, to send as many defendants to the gallows, a figure that declined to confirm or deny Efe director of the Presidential Secretariat, Barun Mitra.
Kalam, in exercise of a constitutional prerogative, has been reluctant so far to sign these statements.
But the main opposition party, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), shows on its website a report with the image of a knot of noose and the eloquent legend "India wants the death of the traitor," referring to the case of Mohammed Afzal .
Afzal, who should have been hanged on 20 October by planning an attempt to attack the Indian Parliament in 2001, is pending that Kalam consider a request for clemency