Daily Times

The execution of Imdad Ali, which is scheduled for Tuesday, would be a great travesty of justice. Imdad Ali is a 50-year-old death row inmate who suffers from paranoid schizophrenia, but his defence for insanity has, unfortunately, been rejected due to a technicality in judicial precedent, according to which if the accused flees the scene of the crime he is not considered mentally unfit. This judicial precedent is woefully inadequate to define mental illness, to say the least, and the rejection for Ali’s plea on that basis against the face of numerous medical examinations declaring him to be suffering from paranoid schizophrenia casts serious doubts over the ability of precedent to evolve in Pakistan’s judicial system.

The fact that even jail authorities are sympathetic to Ali’s case, and an examination carried out by the head of psychiatry of the Nishtar Hospital on the request of the superintendent of district Vehari jail formally diagnosed him with paranoid schizophrenia must be enough to merit a revision of Ali’s death sentence. Moreover, there are testimonies of not just family members but also neighbours regarding Ali’s behaviour that is characteristic of paranoid schizophrenia. Unfortunately, Imdad Ali’s case is symptomatic of the faulty criminal justice system of Pakistan for which even the otherwise most ardent supporters of death penalty would not, in good conscience, be able to support the death penalty. And even amidst a narrative in which the death penalty has been deemed an imperative to eliminate militancy in the country, the execution of a mentally unstable person finds not even an iota of justification.

Ranging from incompetent public defence counsel to forced confessions, the problems plaguing the criminal justice system of Pakistan are glaringly apparent. And as those with access to resources are able to evade punishment, it is often the poor who are left to face the gallows. While there is good reason to doubt the veracity of most convictions, but even if there is the slightest chance that an innocent individual would lose his life then the ostensible grounds for the death penalty are lost, and carrying it out turns into the gravest of injustice and one that is wholly irreversible. In any case, advocating death penalty during present times is an anachronism, and there are plenty of studies that have shown that it does not act as an effective deterrent. The philosophical underpinnings of state sanctioned punishment are based on the need for preserving the social order and discouraging people from breaking laws that are there for the common good. While in ancient times the state apparatus was not well-developed and, consequently, the chance of catching a criminal were low, punishments were made severe and carried out in public to increase the cost of committing a crime. Now with the modern police system and advanced powers of surveillance, the functional need for the death penalty is no longer there.

Furthermore, a much more effective purpose of the criminal justice system is not the dispensation of punishment but the task of reformation. This takes into account the different circumstances that force an individual into becoming a criminal, and hence the responsibility of society is not to punish that person but to fix him and turn him into a functioning member of society. It is true that Pakistan is far from this ideal, but perhaps a starting point could be to not execute a mentally unfit person. Pardon Imdad Ali.*