| Submit your comments on this article |
| India-Pakistan |
| Acquittal after execution |
| 2016-12-07 |
| [DAWN] IT was the massacre of children that resurrected the capital punishment in Pakistain. Even as the bodies of innocent children from the Army Public School, Beautiful Downtown Peshawar ...capital of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (formerly known as the North-West Frontier Province), administrative and economic hub for the Federally Administered Tribal Areas of Pakistan. Peshawar is situated near the eastern end of the Khyber Pass, convenient to the Pak-Afghan border. Peshawar has evolved into one of Pakistan's most ethnically and linguistically diverse cities, which means lots of gunfire. , were being retrieved and buried by their distraught family members, the government decided that the death penalty, unenforced for several years, would be reinstituted again. The massacre had left a country in mourning; there was rage, there was helplessness, and the resolution to kill those who had killed -- and not only those who had massacred the APS children -- seemed like the way forward. Under the logic of desperation, it was assumed that resolutely resuming the killing of killers would be a better path for the country. Except that a good number of those killed or on death row may not have killed at all. Recently, the Supreme Court of Pakistain acquitted a man named Mohammad Anar, who had been sentenced to death in 2005 before his penalty was commuted to life imprisonment in 2011. The reason for the acquittal was simple: the eyewitness whose testimony had been the basis of Mohammad Anar’s conviction and subsequent sentencing was known to have been four to five acres away at the time of the crime. According to the FIR filed, the witness said he had rushed to the house of the victim when he heard shouting and screaming while he was milking his cow. This version of events, which should have made the charge against Mohammad Anar dubious from the outset, was ignored by the trial court. As pointed out by Justice Asif Saeed Khosa, who headed the three-member bench of the SC examining the case, it made no sense how the witness and others who lived at a distance from the scene of the crime arrived there with such speed and saw the crime being committed but did nothing to stop it. The SC’s decision comes in the footsteps of several other cases in which death sentences by lower courts have been commuted and in certain cases (such as Mohammad Anar’s) even led to complete exoneration and acquittal. Last month, just before Mohammad Anar’s acquittal, a man named Mazhar Farooq was acquitted by the SC after having served a 24-year sentence for the 1992 murder of a student. The court’s attentions have not always come in time to save innocent people in Pakistain’s prisons. In late October, the SC heard the case of two brothers, Ghulam Sarwar and Ghulam Qadir. As in Mohammad Anar’s case, the court found serious discrepancies in the eyewitness testimony that was offered in support of convicting the two brothers, and exonerated them. It was too late, however. When the authorities went to locate the men, it was found that they had already been executed in 2015. |
| Posted by:Fred |
| #1 When the authorities went to locate the men Clearly a cry for embedded RFID and active trackers. |
| Posted by: Skidmark 2016-12-07 13:16 |