India's top judge opposes death penalty
Source: Reuters
By Samanwaya Rautray NEW DELHI, Jan 13 (Reuters) - India's top judge, whose court turned down an appeal by a man sentenced to death for an attack on parliament, said on Saturday he opposed the death penalty but courts were bound to impose it in the "rarest of rare" cases. Justice Y.K. Sabharwal, the outgoing head of the panel of five Supreme Court judges who rejected on Friday the final plea for review by a Kashmiri man sentenced to death for helping to launch a deadly attack on the Indian parliament on 2001. Mohammad Afzal, an Indian national, had filed the petition before the nation's highest court on the ground he had been denied satisfactory legal representation during his trial. "Once a court arrives at a conclusion that a case falls in the category of 'rarest of rare' it has no option but to award death penalty," Sabharwal said in his last news conference before his retirement. "My personal view that death penalty should be abolished doesn't matter," he said. "It's up to the legislature to decide whether to retain death penalty." The country's president, A.P.J. Abdul Kalam, was also against imposing the death penalty, he said. Afzal's only hope now lies in a mercy petition pending before the president and the sentence will not be carried out until the president rejects the appeal. Protests erupted late last year in Kashmir against Afzal's execution and the issue has been heatedly debated by political parties and the media. It has been argued India should abolish the death penalty. In India, "rarest of rare" has over the years come to mean gruesome or revolting cases. The last Indian hanged in August 2004, Dhananjay Chhatterjee, was convicted of the brutal rape and murder of a schoolgirl. Indian law stipulates the president should act on the advice of the federal cabinet, but there is no deadline and a decision can be put off indefinitely. Five gunmen stormed the heavily guarded parliament complex on Dec. 13, 2001 but were killed by security forces before they could enter the building where lawmakers sit. Ten other people, mostly security men, were also killed in the exchange of fire. The attack was linked to a separatist revolt in the disputed Himalayan region of Kashmir, the main cause of political tension between India and Pakistan. The Muslim separatist revolt in the region has killed more than 45,000 people since 1989.
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