The 1993 Bombay blast convict Yakub Memon’s plea for stay on his execution, slated for 30th July 2015, will be heard by the Supreme Court today with NLU Delhi’s death penalty litigation clinic as an intervenor.
The hearing comes in the midst of intense public scrutiny as everyone from politicians and eminent academics to Bollywood superstar Salman Khan have made their opinions known on the controversial hanging.
According to an IANS report around 200 people through a petition on Sunday urged President Pranab Mukherjee to reconsider Memon's mercy plea.
The signatories included BJP's Shatrughan Sinha, Congress's Mani Shankar Aiyer, CPI-M leader Sitaram Yechury, CPI's D. Raja, actor Naseeruddin Shah, filmmaker Mahesh Bhatt, activist Tushar Gandhi, lawyer Vrinda Grover and economist Jean Dreze among others.
Yakub Memon, along with 11 others was given the death penalty in July 2007 by a special TADA court for his role n the 1993 Bombay blast that killed 257 people and injured 712 others. On 21st March 2013 the Supreme Court had confirmed Yakub’s death sentence while commuting that of 10 others convicted with him to life imprisonment.
Subsequently on April 9 of this year the court had rejected his petition for review of the death penalty after which the Maharashtra Government issued a death warrant slating Yakub Memon to be executed on 30th July 2015. The petition being heard today seeks a stay on the death warrant based on the argument that it was issued before all legal options available to the convict had been exhausted.
The public debate around Yakub Memon’s hanging took a further unexpected turn when an article by former RAW officer B Raman, who had handled the capture of Yakub Memon in 1994, was recently published by rediff.com.
The article was originally written in 2007, but wasn’t published then. In it, B Raman detailed how Yakub had been arrested informally in Kathmandu, after which he agreed to cooperate with the Indian authorities and was brought to Old Delhi where he was formally arrested.
Raman stated that while Yakub was definitely guilty of involvement in the Bombay blasts in 1993, he was uncomfortable with being under ISI control in Karachi and had subsequently cooperated with the Indian authorities. This, according to Raman, was not brought to the attention of the TADA court and should constitute a mitigating circumstance to commute his death sentence to life imprisonment.
However, the facts mentioned in the article are not in contention before the apex court today. Memon’s plea for quashing of the death penalty is based on the argument that due process was not followed in issuing the execution warrant.
Former apex court judge, Justice Harjit Singh Bedi said in a letter to The Indian Express that the apex court should take suo motu notice of this article and only after hearing both sides, remand the case to the trial court to take further evidence on the question of the sentence or, in the alternative, the evidence itself. He also mentioned that he was against imposition of death penalty.
With IANS inputs