For days on death row, she had been crying her heart out. And until her dying breath, she had maintained that the drugs she was caught with had belonged to her boyfriend.“It was quite sad, but what to do? You commit the crime, you face the penalty,” says the man who was with her to the last, a former hangman who wanted to be known only as AK.
After 81 days in prison, the boy, whose parents were refused access to him, was electrocuted; he had 5,380 volts of electricity surging into his head. Even the United Nations Human Rights Committee says “the death penalty cannot be reconciled with full respect for the right to life”. But will that solve the problems? Many still feel it is unfair that drug traffickers who destroy thousands of lives and murderers can be allowed to walk free after a prison term.The mandatory death sentence is not arbitrary, he insists.
He has a different solution. If the government wants to abolish the mandatory death sentence, he says, we should bring back the jury system.