HYDERABAD: Justice Dr Ambati Lakshmana Rao, former chief justice of the Allahabad High Court, on Tuesday released a report against death penalty, titled Lethal injustice: End unfair trials, stop executions, prepared by the Anti-Death Penalty Asia Network (ADPAN) which examined cases across Asia where innocents were executed.Speaking on the occasion, Justice Lakshmana Rao said, “taking away the life of a member of the society to save the society shows failure on the part of judiciary and society. But in our country, I doubt if anyone was executed following an unfair trial." An advocate of the theory of reformation, he said there were alternative ways to deal with the gravest of crimes and felt it was time to scrap capital punishment.Louise Vischer, coordinator of ADPAN, said only a small number of countries in Asia are still handing out capital punishment but pointed out that their actions have cast a shadow over the entire region. Dr Y Vishnu Priya, associate professor in Osmania law college, termed death penalty as inhuman. She also pointed out that there were a number of under-trial prisoners in the country. The ADPAN report called for a relook at the cases of eight death row convicts in China, India, Indonesia, Japan, Malaysia, Singapore, Taiwan and Pakistan. According to the study, in each case the death sentence was given after an unfair trial and in six of the cases, conviction relied on confession extracted through torture.It also cited a few examples like the case of Taiwan's ministry of justice, which admitted that Chiang Kuo-ching, a pilot in the Air Force was executed in 1997 for a murder he had not committed. “There are at least 55 capital offenses in China, 28 in Pakistan, and 57 in Taiwan. All Asian countries must work towards abolition of the death penalty,” said Ch Narendra, People's Union for Civil Liberities.
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