Daily Times

Man waits for the clock of death to toll but none keener than the one condemned to die in the dungeons that now take the name of death cell in Pakistan. A heart-wrenching end to even the most felonious souls! The pharmakon in the death cell is death itself, where only the bleeding hope lightens the dark eight by twelve feet space that becomes a coffin for the living dead.

The Pakistani minister of state in 2015 reported that there were 6,016 death-row inmates who awaited the Medusa that ends their suffering and tightens her hair around their necks and turn them to stone corpses. One of the recent has been Imdad Ali case, who according to Al Jazeera and other various sources was in the death cell since 2013, with his execution being called off three times due to mental illness that marred his life with paranoid schizophrenia and led him to an even greater hell that existed outside him too, i.e. the dark death cell in Lahore, Punjab.

Although Imdad Ali’a execution was finally called off by the Supreme Court, it might have left an even greater impact on his already baffled and disturbed mind resulting perhaps in claustrophobia. However, Imdad Ali has been a survivor, those executed do not live to tell the tale of gradual murder of their hope due to numerous stays and expiries of the aforementioned, the slow rot of their bodies due to lack of sun, humid conditions and various other weather conditions and the dulling of their senses after being thrown away and forgotten in the dungeons. Here, apart from the release, the death is the only saviour, the sweet pharmakon that chides away all miseries. Additional District and Session Courts Sargodha Judge Farzana Khan reports the misconduct of the jail authorities towards the inmates in the death cells. Her inspection visits revealed that there was gruesome neglect of the inmates by jail authorities, who did not even let the inmates out for their much-supplicated little view of the outside world. The cells are filled with stench that arouses out of the inmate’ own waste, and there is an almost tyrannical rule of the jail authorities over the lives of these persons. Human misery that escapes our eyes should not be allowed abscond from out notice too. Any man awaiting death, dying almost in the hope of being released from these inhuman conditions and the constant mental torture must be sympathised with.