PEOPLE’S UNION FOR DEMOCRATIC RIGHTS
The Murderers of Dhananjoy Hazir Ho!
Abolish Death Penalty
The
irreversibility of death penalty, and the likelihood of innocents being
executed by the Judiciary, is one of the strongest arguments for
abolishing capital punishment. Dhananjoy Chatterjee today joins the list
of persons where clear evidence exists that they were erroneously
handed death penalty by the Indian judicial system. Executed on 14th
August 2004, nearly fourteen years after his arrest in May 1990,
Dhananjoy was convicted for the brutal murder and sexual assault on 18
year old Hetal Parekh, a resident of the apartment building in which he
worked as a guard, in Kolkatain March 1990. Almost 11 years later to
date, a report released by two scholars of Indian Statistical Institute
(Kolkata) exposing the shoddy and biased investigation and trial,
provides evidence that points towards his innocence and wrongful
execution. According to the report by Debashish Sengupta and Prabal
Chaudhury titled "Re-Analysis of the case of the murder of Hetal Parekh:
And the Judicial Killing of Dhananjay Chatterjee" all the mainstays of
the police and prosecution’s story are open to question:
· Witnesses: The
police case was based on certain witness accounts which are suspect.
The police claimed that the apartment liftman had left Dhananjoy on the
floor of the victim’s apartment. The liftman denied this in court; so
much so, that the prosecution had to declare him a hostile witness. The
police seizure list was signed as witness by a person who supplies tea
to the police station. He didn’t turn up to give evidence during the
trial.
· Recoveries: A
necklace recovered at the scene of crime, which the police claimed to
be Dhananjoy’s, turned out to belong to another apartment staffer who
claimed to have given it to Dhananjoy. Again, police never bothered to
tally the number of that watch with the one recovered from Dhananjoy’s
village house and which the Parekh family claimed was stolen from their
house.
· Forensic evidence:
There were 21 stab wounds on the victim’s body, but no murder weapon
was recovered.The victim’s body was lying in a pool of blood, yet no
witness claimed that they saw any blood on Dhananjoy’s clothes. While
semen traces were found in the victim’s vagina, no DNA test was done to
ascertain if it was of the accused.
· Role of the family: The rape and murder allegedly happened in the very short time between 5:20 PM and 5:50 PM,
while the victim’s mother was out of the house. However there was a
delay of three hours between the discovery of Hetal’s body by her mother
and the calling in of the police, allowing for tampering of evidence.
The mother’s immediate naming of Dhananjoy as the culprit, the
inconsistencies in the statements of other family members, and the fact
that the family wrapped up their flourishing jewelry business in the
city within six months of the crime and left Kolkata – all raise
questions about the role of the family, and the possibility of an honour
killing, especially given that sexual intercourse had preceded the
murder.
· Police’s Complicity:The
letter of complaint to the security agency by the victim’s father,
alleging that Dhananjoy used to harass Hetal used by the police to
establish motive, seems to have been written after the crime in order to
manufacture evidence against Dhananjoy. The police overlooked the above
mentioned inconsistencies in the family’s story, the corruption of the
scene of the crime etc.
Several questions arise:
· Why was the police investigation so shoddy?
· How
was the death penalty pronounced, given all these gaps in the
investigation and the inconsistency of the evidence presented?
· Why did the trial courts not pay attention and allow legal ‘facts’ to be created?
· Why did the Supreme Court as well as the President, as it now emerges, unquestioningly accept the ‘facts’ of the case?
· Why
did the courts not consider that he came from a very poor and
underprivileged background and couldn’t mount a proper legal defence at
the lower courts?
· Why
was it immaterial that at the time of his hanging, Dhananjoy had
already lived in the shadow of death for 14 years since his arrest? He
was, in fact, punished twice for the same crime - a fact pointed out by
those arguing for commutation. The popular frenzy demanding Dhananjoy’s
death arising from the facts of the young age of the victim, the
brutality of the murder, the alleged sexual violence, and the class
divide all decided the outcome.
The
erroneous judgment in the execution of Dhananjoy once more demonstrates
the inherent class bias against the poor and the privileging of the
rich, which takes precedence over proper investigation or an impartial
judicial process. The appeals got decided, as they very often do,
heeding the “collective conscience” of the privileged opinion makers
baying for the blood of the accused.
The report makes clear that Dhananjoy Chatterjee is only the latest addition in the list of wrongful executions in India. In 2012, 14 eminent jurists including Justice PB Sawant, Justices
A P Shah, B A Khan, B H Marlapalle, B G Kolse-Patil, Hosbet Suresh,
Prabha Sridevan, K P Sivasubramaniam, RS Verma, and P C Jain had
appealed for the commutation of death penalty in separate letters to the
President in the cases of 13 persons on death row who they claimed were
erroneously sentenced to death. They specifically drew attention to the
grave miscarriage of justice in the case of Ravji Ram and Surja Ram who
were hanged in the late 1990s and who according to the Supreme Court's
own acknowledgement were wrongly executed.
While
the possibility of miscarriage of justice is ever-present and no form
of punishment is reversible, the death penalty forecloses any
possibility of reversal. That the so-called safeguards – judicial review
before the SC and the mercy petition before the President - are
fallible, have been once again illustrated. The trial and death sentence
awarded to Dhananjoy, as it turns out, was an act of judicial murder.
Today
the least the apex court ought to do is to commute all death sentences
and come out with a judicial dictum abolishing Death Penalty. The
collective conscience of conscientious Indians asks for nothing less
than the abolition of Death Penalty.
Megha Bahl & Sharmila Purkayastha
(Secretaries PUDR)
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