Death-row prisoner Shafqat Hussain was hanged to death at the Karachi Central Prison in the wee hours of Tuesday, after his hanging was postponed on four previous occasions this year.Shafqat was arrested and sentenced to death in 2004 for the kidnapping and involuntary murder of a seven-year-old boy who lived in a Karachi apartment building where Shafqat worked as a security guard. All courts in the land had turned down his appeals and the Supreme Court threw out a review petition that was the first to raise the matter of Shafqat’s juvenility at the time of arrest, maintaining that this line of defence should have been introduced at the trial court level.The case also garnered a lot of attention on social and mainstream media and became a bone of contention between supporters and opponents of the death penalty. Rights groups including anti-death penalty campaigners Reprieve and Amnesty International had pleaded desperately with the government not to carry out the execution.He was then set to be executed on March 19 but a day before the sentencing, civil society representatives gathered in front of the Presidency against the order. The hanging was subsequently postponed for 72 hours and then for 30 days.United Nations human rights lawyers have said that his trial fell short of international standards. The various authorities in Pakistan have stood by their claims as to the rightness of his conviction and that he was of the age of majority when convicted.The carrying out of the death penalty can only be justified when every vestige of doubt as to the guilt of the person to be executed is gone. Pakistan has a deeply flawed criminal justice system. There is corruption, inefficiency and malfeasance at every level. Police procedures a decade ago were no better than they are today — and they are woefully deficient now. The methods of collection and recording of evidence are often poor, evidence is tainted or poorly kept, and witness statements incorrectly recorded. The death penalty was reinstated after the carnage of the Army Public School massacre in Peshawar last December, supposedly as a deterrent to terrorism. Most of those hanged since have been convicted of domestic offences or were simple criminals, guilty as charged yes, but not terrorists. As has been proven countless times across the world, the death penalty does not serve as a deterrent to crime, even in places like China and Saudi Arabia where hundreds are executed every year. Innocent people have been put to death in Pakistan and there will be more innocent men and women hanged.
