“The government should walk the talk that there shall be no executions until the Bill to abolish the ‘mandatory’ death penalty was tabled in Parliament.”
The Attorney-General and the government should not play Russian roulette with the lives of inmates on death row by arbitrary, “secretive” and hasty executions, she added. “It should immediately impose a moratorium on executions for all crimes.”
The MP was commenting on the fact that it would be a week on Friday since the “secretive” execution of three men in Taiping. “They had been sentenced to death for a crime that took place in 2005 in Sungai Petani.”
The families had been given a letter from the Taiping Prisons Department on Wednesday 23 March informing them that they may visit their sons on Thursday after 9 am and that they will be carrying out the executions in the soonest time, noted Kasthuri. “The letter concluded that the families may also discuss on claiming the bodies of the three men after the execution for their burials.”
The letters had been dated 10 March and according to the families, they had only received them on 23 March, a delay of 13 days, said the MP. “This may be deliberate to deprive the families of help and support from various bodies who may try to halt the executions.”
While she does not condone or defend the crimes committed by the three men and other offenders, the nature in which the executions had taken place had been extremely shady, “secretive” and hasty, she reiterated. “To top it all, questions have been raised if any particular case had become a victim of the miscarriage of justice.”
It is apparent that the prisons were bent on executing the three men come hell or high water, charged the MP.
In November last year, she reminded, a roundtable discussion had been held in Parliament by “Parliamentarians for Global Action for the Abolition of the Death Penalty” on initiatives, commitments and particularly reforms on the state of inmates on death row and the abolition of the mandatory death penalty.
The main outcome of the meeting was that the government put in place an official moratorium on executions pending the assessment of the report on effectiveness of the death penalty, said Kasthuri. “The government pledged to introduce a Bill to abolish the mandatory death penalty for all offences and a review of the existing death row cases.”