CENTRE FOR CAPITAL PUNISHMENT STUDIES

Courts more cautious on death case

Percentage of overturned verdicts falls ’as review policy is working’

The percentage of death sentences being overturned by the Supreme People’s Court hasfallen sharply since 2007, due to tighter court procedures, Hu Yunteng, the top court’s directorof research, said.

There has been a steady decrease in the percentage over the last five years after the topjudicial authority reinstated a review of all sentences carrying the death penalty.

Just 7 percent of casesordering capital punishmentwere rejected last year,compared with 10 percent in2010 and 14 percent in 2007,according to figures from thetop court.

Hu declined to reveal howmany people were executedannually, but said the totalnumber was falling each year.

There had been a decreaselast year in the number ofpeople committing crimespunishable by death, such asmurder, violent robbery, rapeand kidnapping, he said.

“Courts have mastereduniform policy, includingprocedural and evidencenorms, for cases in which thedeath penalty could be apossibility,” Hu said.

Consequently, the number ofdeath sentences overturneddue, for example, to mistakesin gathering evidence weresignificantly lower, he said.

Sentences that wereoverturned were mostly due toprocedural flaws, inappropriatesentences or crimes related tofinance.

In February last year, theNational People’s Congress,the top legislature, removed 13 crimes that qualified for capital punishment, in the latestamendment to the Criminal Law. These crimes were non-violent or were primarily related tofinance.

The revised amendment to another law, the Criminal Procedure Law, was passed by the toplegislature in March and will take effect next year.

According to the amendment,the second trial of all cases that carried the death penalty shouldbe heard at a court session.

On top of this, the Supreme People’s Court will deliver the final ruling on whether to approve orreject death sentences passed by provincial-level courts.

Moreover, the top court will question defendants during the review session and listen todefense lawyers’ opinions, subject to request.

The Supreme People’s Procuratorate can also now put forward views for the top court.

“The revised draft embodies the policies of justice with mercy and makes sure a death penaltycan only be imposed for the most heinous crimes,” he said.

The Supreme People’s Court on April 20 rejected the death sentence for former tycoon WuYing after questioning the defendant. Wu was convicted of illegally raising as much as 770million yuan ($121 million) for investments.

While upholding the conviction and legitimacy of previous judicial proceedings, the courtdeclined to approve the death sentence due to lack of evidence, and referred the case back tothe high people’s court in East China’s Zhejiang province.

Wu was sentenced to death in 2009 by a local court in Jinhua, Zhejiang, for illegally raisingfunds. More than half of these funds were lost in failed investments.

Her case attracted widespread attention from the domestic and international media. Much ofthis focused on the difficulties facing private businesses trying to raise capital.

According to the top court, about 95 percent of death sentences approved in China are forserious crimes, such as homicide, robbery, serious injury, rape, drug trafficking andkidnapping.

Hu said the revised draft to the Criminal Procedure Law is the first to allow the top court tocross-examine defendants, as well as directly commute the death sentence.

Li Guifang, deputy director of the criminal defense department under the All China LawyersAssociation, said the amendment has played an obvious role in fully protecting the humanrights of suspects.

“During the review period, the top court can question the suspects and listen to their lawyersbefore making a final ruling,” Li said.

While acknowledging the progress of the draft amendment, Li said he hoped that a possiblestep might see an appropriate application for death penalty cases.

“What’s more, the top court should not only examine evidence, but issue regulations to betterdefine serious crimes to ensure the death penalty can only be imposed for the most heinouscrimes,” he added.

Latent Effects of Capital Punishment

The final chapter in The Oxford Handbook of Sentencing and Corrections answered a question that has perplexed me since I started serving my prison term 25 years ago. I used to wonder about my judge’s rationale when he imposed a term that would keep me confined for decades despite my not having had a history of violence or previous incarceration. Until I read “The Dark at the Top of the Stairs: Four Destructive Influences of Capital Punishment on American Criminal Justice,” the logic behind the severity of my punishment escaped me. There must’ve been a reason, but I couldn’t grasp it.

Franklin E. Zimring, who is the William G. Simon Professor of Law and the Wolfen Distinguished Scholar at Berkeley Law, co-authored the chapter with David T. Johnson, who is Professor of Sociology at the University of Hawaii. Together, they explained that although far fewer than 1 percent of all prisoners in the United States were sentenced to death, ripple effects of the death penalty extended to hundreds of thousands of offenders beyond those formally charged with capital crimes. In their illuminating chapter, the professors discussed “four latent impacts of attempts to revive and rationalize the death penalty in the United States.”

First, the professors described “The Hyperextension of Substantive Criminal Law.” By hyperextension, they meant that we expected too much from the criminal law when we expected it to serve as a mechanism that would sort between killings, the motivations behind them, and the punishments that would follow. As it was currently written, some murders merited punishments of execution while with other murders, imprisonment would suffice as a punishment. In expecting the criminal law to make the distinction of which murders were deserving of death, society expected more than the legal code could deliver.

Those separations of murder began in 1794, when the state of Pennsylvania divided murder into first- and second-degree categories. The purpose of the separation was to introduce a lesser offense that would spare the murderer from exposure to capital punishment. Professors Zimring and Johnson, however, found that the distinctions between the two offenses “lacked moral authority and intellectual rigor.”

By the mid-1970s, the Supreme Court made several rulings that essentially limited the death penalty to murder cases and addressed constitutional implications that would determine when jurors could sentence murderers to death. Those rulings required a series of principled standards to separate murderers that may merit death sentences from murderers who would be punished by imprisonment. Those newly imposed standards would require jurors to consider aggravating and mitigating circumstances in order to justify a death penalty. But the list of aggravating circumstances lacked a detailed justification of what actions would warrant a death sentence and why, while other facts would merit imprisonment as a punishment.

The lack of justification or analysis of the aggravating factors that could lead to death sentences resulted in an “incoherence of formal legal conceptions.” Rather than scrutinizing the distinctions that could expose one murderer to the death penalty and another to imprisonment, judges assumed a “legislative competence,” meaning the judges assumed that lawmakers had given appropriate levels of deliberation to each factor. Yet, while judges assumed that lawmakers had thoroughly deliberated each aggravating factor behind death-penalty justifications, the legislative record lacked any indication of how or why lawmakers selected the list of aggravating factors that could expose a defendant to death. That lack of debate suggested that the aggravating factors were selected arbitrarily, perhaps to satisfy the Supreme Court rulings, making for a flimsy substantive law that separated penalties of death from penalties of imprisonment. Without detailed scrutiny of aggravating factors in the legislative process, rules that guided juror decisions in death-penalty cases were without strong jurisprudential basis, impeaching the legitimacy of the entire criminal justice system.

The authors then wrote about “The symbolic Transformation to Harsh Punishment as a Private Reward.” They argued that government could increase its destructive power by appeasing victims with ever-increasing penalties for offenders. So long as victims were being “rewarded” with the satisfaction that came with vengeance through state punishment, there wouldn’t be as much scrutiny over the capacity of the penal system to accomplish other stated goals of deterrence, incapacitation, or reform.

Punishments became “symbolic rewards,” demonstrating that the state placed a higher value on victims than it placed on offenders. There weren’t any upward limits. The harsher the punishment, the better victims would feel. Symbolic rewards of punishment differed from conventional retribution, where penal proportionality was a limiting principle. As punishments transformed to have hierarchical and symbolic meanings, with more being better, the menu of punishments expanded and new distinctions brought new status rewards for victims. As long as the additional grades of punishments made victims feel better, the state could increase its power without as much scrutiny over liberties that laws were usurping.

The symbolic transformation to harsh punishment as a private reward “degovernmentalized” the death penalty. Instead of establishing a punishment that served the needs of the community, the punishment served the needs of the victim. It led to a proliferation of additional punishments as status rewards, and contributed to a massive growth of America’s imprisoned population.

The authors then pointed to “The Problematics of Life Without Parole (LWOP)” as an example of expanded punishments. For the most part, the LWOP penalty was a new subcategory of life terms. It did not replace the old life terms but rather was another step up the penal ladder, or another rung on the hierarchy of punishment, above life sentences with parole eligibility but below death. Symbolically, it could have value for the family members of victims, as LWOP represented a severe sanction for the offender, showing the value of the victim by inflicting a never-ending punishment for the crime.

The authors showed that although LWOP may have originally been conceived as an alternative to death sentences, it evolved into an expansion of the punishment menu. They cited figures from 1993 that showed 12,453 prisoners were serving life without parole in the United States. By the year 2008, that number had risen to 41,095, for an increase of 230 percent. Further, in states that offered punishment options of death or LWOP, there wasn’t a decline in death penalty cases, just a massive increase in the number of prisoners serving sentence of LWOP. Indeed, thousands of drug offenders served sentences of LWOP in federal prison despite their not having had histories of violence or weapons.

Professors Zimring and Johnson argued that the death penalty masked the severity of LWOP sentences. Many citizens misconstrued LWOP as an act of mercy, failing to recognize the enormous pain and public expense that accompanied LWOP sentences, many of which were imposed for nonviolent crimes by consenting adults. The authors theorized that the “American focus on capital punishment has desensitized public concern about the huge growth of imprisonment,” where sentences of multiple decades have become the norm. The distinguished professors wisely proposed “routine administrative review of most long and life sentences,” but recognized that we were likely light years away from such reforms.

Finally, the authors made a compelling argument to show how the “Diversion of Legal and Judicial Resources from the Scrutiny of Other Uses of State Power” influenced the entire system. When prosecutors charged defendants in ways that exposed them to death sentences, they ushered in the need for “super due process,” requiring enormous legal expenses at every stage of the judicial proceedings. Complying with constitutional standards for the imposition of the death penalty required the expenditure of those financial and professional resources, but they came from a limited pool. Our nation had a finite number of lawyers with the skill set necessary to challenge the overreach of governmental authority. When most of those lawyers concentrated their energy on the 3,500 capital defendants on death row, the result was “a shortage of resources to monitor state authority in a nation with more than 2 million persons behind bars.”

The authors pointed out that for every prisoner who was sentenced to death, there were 500 prisoners who were sentenced to imprisonment. And yet when the Supreme Court reviewed cases of a criminal nature, they gave disproportionate attention to death-penalty cases. Nearly half of all criminal cases that the Supreme Court reviewed concerned the death penalty, leaving insufficient judicial resources “to scrutinize the vast expansion of state punishment in the United States.” The opportunity costs of reviewing death-penalty issues translated into insufficient resources to review other parts of the criminal justice system.

Taken together, the “four latent impacts” of the death penalty that Professors Zimring and Johnson articulated in their chapter helped me grasp a possible rationale for the lengthy sentence I served. Their work explained that an enduring legacy of the American resurgence of capital punishment was that it helped to take the focus off of other areas of the criminal justice system, and in the process, eviscerated protections against governmental excess. The focus that society placed on the death penalty desensitized citizens to other abuses of governmental power. Sentences that required defendants to serve years, decades, or multiple decades in prison became acceptable, even in cases where violence was not a factor. The quarter century that I served in prison may not have had anything to do with justice, as it turned out, but instead furthered America’s commitment to mass incarceration and an overreach of governmental power.

(Source: The Huffington Post)

Prison too good for some, but execution bad for us

Let’s agree killing people is wrong.

Surely everyone can get together on that.

After all, it is murder that provokes those Old Testament cries for a return to the death penalty every time a new and heinous crime is uncovered.

In the wake of a fatal shooting at Toronto’s Eaton Centre and the arrest of accused “body parts” killer Luka Magnotta, a Toronto city councillor is attempting to spark a national debate on capital punishment.

Recently Conservative Sen. Pierre Hugues-Boisvenu—whose daughter was raped and murdered in 2002—said serial killers should be given a rope to hang themselves in prison.

An Angus Reid poll suggested more than half of Canadians favour the death penalty for the crime of homicide.

Canada’s last execution took place in 1962.

The death penalty was abolished here in 1976 and removed from military law 14 years ago.

According to Amnesty International, 97 counties have banned capital punishment and only 57 governments retain the death penalty in active use.

Last year, China executed the most people, followed by Saudi Arabia, Iran and Iraq.

Oh yeah. That’s a list we want to be on. The arguments on both sides are well known.

Rednecks shout about the cost of keeping monsters in prison without, oddly, considering the great expense of executions and the cost of preliminary judicial appeals. Bleeding hearts note capital punishment is proved to not work as a deterrent, and they worry an innocent man or woman might be put to death.

It is all mud in the water, because killing people is wrong.

Perhaps this country’s blood lust comes less from an eye-for-an-eye ideology and more from frustration with the perceived quality of life within Canada’s penal system.

It’s fair enough to say “prison is too good” for some people. Surely we can find middle ground between killing a convicted killer and offering him free Internet and a college education.

Any society can be accurately judged not by how it treats its best members, but by how it treats its worst.

Canada is better than our demons. We can agree killing people is just wrong.

(Source: lfpress.com)

The Case of Carlos DeLuna

A few years ago, Antonin Scalia, one of the nine justices on the US supreme court, made a bold statement. There has not been, he said, “a single case – not one – in which it is clear that a person was executed for a crime he did not commit. If such an event had occurred … the innocent’s name would be shouted from the rooftops.”

Scalia may have to eat his words. It is now clear that a person was executed for a crime he did not commit, and his name – Carlos DeLuna – is being shouted from the rooftops of the Columbia Human Rights Law Review. The august journal has cleared its entire spring edition, doubling its normal size to 436 pages, to carry an extraordinary investigation by a Columbia law school professor and his students.

The book sets out in precise and shocking detail how an innocent man was sent to his death on 8 December 1989, courtesy of the state ofTexas. Los Tocayos Carlos: An Anatomy of a Wrongful Execution, is based on six years of intensive detective work by Professor James Liebman and 12 students.

Starting in 2004, they meticulously chased down every possible lead in the case, interviewing more than 100 witnesses, perusing about 900 pieces of source material and poring over crime scene photographs and legal documents that, when stacked, stand over 10ft high.

What they discovered stunned even Liebman, who, as an expert in America’s use of capital punishment, was well versed in its flaws. “It was a house of cards. We found that everything that could go wrong did go wrong,” he says.

Carlos DeLuna was arrested, aged 20, on 4 February 1983 for the brutal murder of a young woman, Wanda Lopez. She had been stabbed once through the left breast with an 8in lock-blade buck knife which had cut an artery causing her to bleed to death.

From the moment of his arrest until the day of his death by lethal injection six years later, DeLuna consistently protested he was innocent. He went further – he said that though he hadn’t committed the murder, he knew who had. He even named the culprit: a notoriously violent criminal called Carlos Hernandez.

Police detective Escobedo, who headed the investigation, standing on evidence at the crime scene. Within two hours, the Shamrock had been cleaned up. Photograph: Corpus Christi police department

The two Carloses were not just namesakes – or tocayos in Spanish, as referenced in the title of the Columbia book. They were the same height and weight, and looked so alike that they were sometimes mistaken for twins. When Carlos Hernandez’s lawyer saw pictures of the two men, he confused one for the other, as did DeLuna’s sister Rose.

At his 1983 trial, Carlos DeLuna told the jury that on the day of the murder he’d run into Hernandez, who he’d known for the previous five years. The two men, who both lived in the southern Texas town of Corpus Christi, stopped off at a bar. Hernandez went over to a gas station, the Shamrock, to buy something, and when he didn’t return DeLuna went over to see what was going on.

DeLuna told the jury that he saw Hernandez inside the Shamrock wrestling with a woman behind the counter. DeLuna said he was afraid and started to run. He had his own police record for sexual assault – though he had never been known to possess or use a weapon – and he feared getting into trouble again.

“I just kept running because I was scared, you know.” When he heard the sirens of police cars screeching towards the gas station he panicked and hid under a pick-up truck where, 40 minutes after the killing, he was arrested.

At the trial, DeLuna’s defence team told the jury that Carlos Hernandez, not DeLuna, was the murderer. But the prosecutors ridiculed that suggestion. They told the jury that police had looked for a “Carlos Hernandez” after his name had been passed to them by DeLuna’s lawyers, without success. They had concluded that Hernandez was a fabrication, a “phantom” who simply did not exist. The chief prosecutor said in summing up that Hernandez was a “figment of DeLuna’s imagination”.

Four years after DeLuna was executed, Liebman decided to look into the DeLuna case as part of a project he was undertaking into the fallibility of the death penalty. He asked a private investigator to spend one day – just one day – looking for signs of the elusive Carlos Hernandez.

By the end of that single day the investigator had uncovered evidence that had eluded scores of Texan police officers, prosecutors, defense lawyers and judges over the six years between DeLuna’s arrest and execution. Carlos Hernandez did indeed exist.

Liebman’s investigator tracked down within a few hours a woman who was related to both the Carloses. She supplied Hernandez’s date of birth, which in turn allowed the unlocking of Hernandez’s criminal past as the case rapidly unravelled.

With the help of his students, Liebman began to piece together a profile of Hernandez. He was an alcoholic with a history of violence, who was always in the company of his trusted companion: a lock-blade buck knife.

Over the years he was arrested 39 times, 13 of them for carrying a knife, and spent his entire adult life on parole. Yet he was almost never put in prison for his crimes – a disparity that Liebman believes was because he was used as a police informant. “Its hard to understand what happened without that piece of the puzzle,” Liebman says.

Several of the crimes that Hernandez committed involved hold-ups of Corpus Christi gas stations. Just a few days before the Shamrock murder he was found cowering outside a nearby 7-Eleven wielding a knife – a detail never disclosed to DeLuna’s defence.

He also had a history of violence towards women. He was twice arrested on suspicion of the 1979 murder of a woman called Dahlia Sauceda, who was stabbed and then had an “X” carved into her back. The first arrest was made four years before DeLuna’s trial and the second while DeLuna was on death row, yet the connection between this Hernandez and the “phantom” presented to DeLuna’s jury was never made.

In October 1989, just two months before DeLuna was executed, Hernandez was setenced to 10 years’ imprisonment for attempting to kill with a knife another woman called Dina Ybanez. Even then, no one thought to alert the courts or Texas state as it prepared to put DeLuna to death.

Hernandez himself frequently told people that he was a knife murderer. He made numerous confessions to having killed Wanda Lopez, the crime for which DeLuna was executed, joking with friends and relatives that his “tocayo” had taken the fall. His admissions were so widely broadcast that even Corpus Christi police detectives came to hear about them within weeks of the incident at the Shamrock gas station.

Yet this was the same Carlos Hernandez who prosecutors told the jury did not exist. This was the figment of Carlos DeLuna’s imagination.

Carlos DeLuna: Photograph: Corpus Christi police department

Many other glaring discrepancies also stand out in the DeLuna case. He was put on death row largely on the eyewitness testimony of one man, Kevan Baker, who had seen the fight inside the Shamrock and watched the attacker flee the scene.

Yet when Baker was interviewed 20 years later, he said that he hadn’t been that sure about the identification as he had trouble telling one Hispanic person apart from another.

Then there was the crime-scene investigation. Detectives failed to carry out or bungled basic forensic procedures that might have revealed information about the killer. No blood samples were collected and tested for the culprit’s blood type.

Fingerprinting was so badly handled that no useable fingerprints were taken. None of the items found on the floor of the Shamrock – a cigarette stub, chewing gum, a button, comb and beer cans – were forensically examined for saliva or blood.

There was no scraping of the victim’s fingernails for traces of the attacker’s skin. When Liebman and his students studied digitally enhanced copies of crime scene photographs, they were amazed to find the footprint from a man’s shoe imprinted in a pool of Lopez’s blood on the floor – yet no effort was made to measure it.

“There it was,” says Liebman. “The murderer had left his calling card at the scene, but it was never used.”

Even the murder weapon, the knife, was not properly examined, though it was covered in blood and flesh.

Other photographs show Lopez’s blood splattered up to three feet high on the walls of the Shamrock counter. Yet when DeLuna’s clothes and shoes were tested for traces of blood, not a single microscopic drop was found. The prosecution said it must have been washed away by the rain.

There appeared to have been an unseemly scramble to wrap up the crime scene. Less than two hours after the murder happened, the police chief in charge of the homicide investigation ordered all detectives to quit the Shamrock and allowed its owner to wash it down, sweeping away vital evidence that could have saved a man’s life.

The exceptionally lax treatment of evidence continued even beyond the grave. When Liebman asked to see all the stored evidence in the case, so that he could subject it to the DNA testing that was not available to investigators in 1983, he was told that it had all disappeared.

Having lived and breathed this case for so many years, Liebman says the most shocking thing about it was its ordinariness. “This wasn’t the trial of OJ Simpson. It was an obscure case, the kind that could involve anybody. Maybe those are the cases where miscarriages of justice happen, the routine everyday cases where nobody thinks enough about the victim, let alone the defendant.”

The groundbreaking work that the Columbia law school has done comes at an important juncture for the death penalty in America. Connecticut last month became the fifth state in as many years to repeal the ultimate punishment and support for abolition is gathering steam.

In that context, Liebman hopes his exhaustive work will encourage Americans to think more deeply about what is done in their name. All the evidence the Columbia team has gathered on the DeLuna case has been placed on the internet with open public access.

“We’ve provided as complete a set of information as we can about a pretty average case, to let the public make its own judgment. I believe they will make the judgment that in this kind of case there’s just too much risk.”

As for the tocayos Carloses, Carlos Hernandez died of natural causes in a Texas prison in May 1999, having been jailed for assaulting a neighbour with a 9in knife.

Carlos DeLuna commented on his own ending in a television interview a couple of years before his execution. “Maybe one day the truth will come out,” he said from behind reinforced glass. “I’m hoping it will. If I end up getting executed for this, I don’t think it’s right.”

India

Jan. 28

INDIA:

1st death penalty in a drug crime case

In the 1st ever case of capital punishment in a drug crime, a special
Narcotics
court in Chandigarh has awarded death penalty to a person while sentencing
an
African national to 15-years of Rigorous Imprisonment (RI).

The court of Special Judge (Narcotic Drugs and Physchotropic Substances Act)

Shalini Singh Nagpal awarded death sentence to one Paramjeet Singh for
trafficking 10 kilograms of Heroin and supplying it to an African national
Sestus Benson in 2007.

Till now the maximum punishment in drug crime has been RI and a heavy fine.

“Paramjeet was arrested by the Narcotics Control Bureau (NCB) on November
30,
2007 in Chandigarh’s sector-39 as he was illegally delivering 10kg Heroin to

Benson. What made his crime grave was that Paramjeet was out on parole
granted
by a Delhi Court in another drug trafficking case,” NCB Special Public
Prosecutor Kailash Chander said.

This is a 1st-ever case of capital punishment being awarded in a drugs
trafficking case. Benson has been awarded an RI of 15 years and a fine of Rs

1.5 lakh by the court, Chander said.

NCB Zonal Director Rohit Katiyar confirmed the development to PTI and said
the
judgement in the case was historic and would act as a “deterrent in illegal
drugs and crime cases”.

“This is a historic judgement. The judgememnt will go a long way in curbing
the
menace of narcotics abuse in the country, especially amongst the youth,”
Katiyar said.

Paramjeet was earlier arrested by the agency in Delhi in 2005 and was
granted
parole by a Delhi Court and the Chandigarh court not only relied on this
fact
but also the NCB probe to deliver today’s judgement under the Prevention of
Illicit Traffick in Narcotic Drugs and Physchotropic Substances Act (PIT
NDPS),
Chander said.

(source: Hindustan Times)

YEMEN: Demonstrators demand to execute Yemeni president

Tens of thousands of people demonstrated Sunday in Sanaa, demanding the execution of Yemeni President Ali Abdallah Saleh and protesting against the law granting him immunity. The Yemeni Parliament on Saturday granted to Saleh “total immunity against any legal or judicial action.” It also endorsed the candidacy of Vice President Abd Rabbo Mansour Hadi in the presidential election, scheduled Feb. 21 in the country, which in the past year was rocked by unrest that left hundreds dead. Hadi is the only candidate for a 2-year interim term.

“No immunity at the expense of our blood,” read a banner brandished by the demonstrators, who tried to head to the U.S. embassy in Sanaa before being stopped by security forces .

The parliament amended the bill granting immunity to Saleh and his aides, based on an agreement signed to end the internal crisis. Under the new law, aides of Saleh, in power for 33 years and accused by protesters of corruption and nepotism, enjoy immunity “for politically motivated acts, performed in the exercise of their official duties.” However, immunity “does not apply to terrorist acts.”

The UN envoy to Yemen, Jamal Benomar, criticized Saturday night that law, emphasizing the right of “victims” to hold Saleh regime accountable. “The law was amended (…) but remains below our expectations. The UN has a principled stand against this kind of absolute immunity,” he said during a press conference.

He called to enact “a law on justice and reconciliation” that would allow “victims to claim compensation.”

(source: Albawaba News)

TRINIDAD & TOBAGO: ‘Govt working to implement death penalty’

Prime Minister Kamla Persad-Bissessar says Government will work to implement the death penalty as part of a serious crime reduction tool.

Persad-Bissessar was delivering an address yesterday at the Ministry of National Security Planning Workshop organised by the Center for Hemispheric Defense Studies (CHDS) yesterday at the Hyatt Regency (Trinidad) hotel, Port of Spain.

With 30 murders in the first 21 days of the year, she said Government is aware of the upsurge in the homicide rate although it has been reduced significantly from 2009 to 2011.

“Despite the fact the statistics for 2011 reveal a decrease in homicide and serious crime, Government is appalled at the brutal nature of the crime. The cautious optimism with which we viewed last year’s statistics…should not be misinterpreted as complacency,” she said.

She said because of this the People’s Partnership government is prepared to use all the resources including the death penalty to vigorously pursue and contain criminal activity.

“To this end my government is committed to implementation of the death penalty which remains part of the laws of Trinidad and Tobago…We shall continue in our effort to facilitate the re-implementation of the death penalty so it might both punish the guilty and deter the would-be offenders,” she stated.

She said regrettably the Constitution Capital Offences Bill 2011 which required a special majority in Parliament did not receive the support of some members.

She said her Government that had introduced 11 other pieces of legislation to aid in combatting, including the Abolishing of the Preliminary Enquiry Act, the DNA Bill among others.

Persad-Bissessar said since her Government took office back in May 2010, it had been attempting to address “the tsunami of crime that has hit Trinidad and Tobago”.

“We have pledged to the people of this country that we are going to rid the country the scourge of criminal elements which have been allowed for too long to thrive and prosper on the decent, innocent and hard-working people,” she said.

She added that the Government was compelled to admit that criminal violence occurred too regularly.

Earlier in her address, Persad-Bissessar crime and violence threatened the welfare of citizens and economic growth.

Minister of National Security John Sandy said the workshop was aimed at developing a policy where the Caribbean Basin becomes a safer and more secure place to work, live and do business.

Attending the workshop were United States Ambassador Beatrice Welters, Commissioner of Police Dwayne Gibbs and various Government MPs.

At a People’s National Movement (PNM) general council meeting yesterday in Port of Spain, PNM Public Relations Officer, Senator Faris Al-Rawi, said it is untrue that the Opposition failed to give its support to the bill.

Al-Rawi said Government is the one that has failed by its refusal to move from the Privy Council system to the Caribbean Court of Justice (CCJ), which would deny criminals the right to have their final appeal subject to European and United Kingdom law.

“The move to the CCJ is a very important one,” Al-Rawi said.

(source: Trinidad Express)

Algeria demands death sentence for top Qaeda boss

Algerian prosecutors on Sunday requested the death sentence for Mokhtar Belmokhtar, a top leader in Al-Qaeda’s north African branch, and another person in a trial on the deaths of 2 Algerian soldiers.

Belmokhtar and nine co-defendants, of whom 4 are also on the run, are accused of perpetrating several “terrorist acts” including a May 2010 attack on soldiers in the southern Djelfa region that left 2 dead.

Belmokhtar, a native of central Algeria, is a founding member of the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat (GSPC), which later became known as Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM).

He heads one of AQIM’s 2 main katibas (battalions), controlling the group’s southern area.

Prosecutors also sought capital punishment for Abdelkader Benchneb, the chief accused present in court. They urged 15-year jail terms for the others, defence lawyer Hassiba Boumerdessi said.

Algeria has observed a moratorium on capital punishment since 1993.

A ruling was due later Sunday.

Nicknamed “the uncatchable,” Belmokhtar rules over a large swathe of desert that straddles Algeria, Chad, Niger, Mali and Mauritania and where his men are believed to hold several Europeans hostage.

Belmokhtar has already been sentenced in absentia to life imprisonment in 2004 and 2008, and to 20 years in prison in 2007, over similar charges and the killing of 13 customs officers.

In November Belmokhtar told a Mauritanian news website that AQIM had acquired Libyan weapons during fighting that ended in the overthrow and killing of strongman Moamer Kadhafi.

He said AQIM was still demanding the withdrawal of French troops from Afghanistan in exchange for the release of its French hostages.

On January 2, an Algiers court sentenced Abdelhamid Abou Zeid, the leader of the other key AQIM katiba who is also on the run, to life in prison for creating “an international terror group”.

(source: Africasia.com)

Iran to execute programmer

Imagine you are a furniture retailer and one of your customers bought furniture from your shop for a brothel, unfortunately, police raid that brothel and they find the furniture used in there came from your shop. With that, you face charges of associating with prostitution and you’re sentenced to death.

Iran’s Supreme Court has rejected an appeal and upheld the death sentence for a web programmer who faces imminent execution for associating with porn websites.

Saeed Malekpour, an Iranian who hold permanent residency in Canada, was picked up by plain-clothed officers in October 2008, while visiting his relatives in Iran, and taken to Evin prison in Tehran, where he spent a year in solitary confinement without access to lawyers and without charge.

1 year after his arrest, the 35-year-old appeared in a state television program confessing to a series of crimes in connection with a porn website. On the basis of his TV confessions, he was convicted of designing and moderating adult materials online by a court in Tehran, which handed down death penalty.

Malekpour later wrote a letter to his wife from prison, in which he said the TV confessions had been made under duress. He was blindfolded, handcuffed and attacked by several individuals armed with cables, batons and their fists struck and punched him. At times, they would flog his head and neck. They forced him to write what the interrogators were dictating, and compel him to play a role in front of the camera based on their scenarios.

Speaking from Toronto in tears, Malekpour’s wife, Fatemeh Eftekhari, said her husband was a freelance web programmer who had written a photo uploading software that has been used by a porn website without his knowledge.

Eftekhari said, “Even if my husband’s charges were true, which they are not, it’s hard to imagine why he should be sentenced to death. If he was engaged in developing and administrating porn website as charged by the Iranian regime, why would he step into Iran?”

His sister, Maryam Malekpour, speaking to RFE/RL’s Radio Farda from Tehran on January 18: “All of Saeed’s activities were within the law, he didn’t commit anything illegal. Saeed just wrote a computer program to help others upload and manage their photos, and market it online; it could have been used by any website on the internet. Unfortunately, without his knowledge, the program was sold and used to upload photos on these immoral websites.”

“All the evidence they have against him is from his confessions,” she said. “Saeed was in solitary confinement for about one and a half years and was under extreme physical and emotional pressure. For sure, anyone who is in this condition and wants it to end will confess to anything they’re asked.”

Ms. Malekpour believes that one of the reasons behind her brother’s imprisonment and conviction could be his ties to Canada. Canadian media said he was awaiting citizenship at the time of his arrest. Canada has recently joined the United States and European countries in stepping up sanctions on Iran in recent months, amid mounting concern as its nuclear program and in response to the country’s abysmal human rights record.

Ms. Malekpour says her own letters to Iranian judicial officials defending her brother have gone unanswered. She has pledged to continue her efforts and says she remains hopeful.

The Iranian Supreme Court sentenced Saeed to death for ‘insulting the sanctity of Islam’, being responsible for ‘spreading corruption on earth’ and ‘threatening to destroy the Iranian nation’, a vaguely worded charge which attracted the death penalty in Iran.

Saeed’s sentence has prompted reactions from human rights activists and organisations who have launched a campaign to save his life. In a January 17 statement, Canadian Foreign Minister John Baird condemned the Iranian Supreme Court’s decision.

Gloria Nafziger of Amnesty International in Canada, an organisation that has sought for Malekpour’s sentence to be commuted said: “Amnesty International is very concerned that Saeed Malekpour is facing a death sentence in Iran after an unfair trial and reports that he was tortured in order to confess to his crimes.”

Maryam Nayeb Yazdi, a human rights activist based in Toronto, said, “Saeed is in imminent danger of execution. He has never been provided with a fair trial at any point during this horrific and twisted ordeal.”

(source: Zimbabwe Metro)