‘Cruel’ punishment: LHC halts hanging of ‘paralysed’ prisoner

LAHORE:

Lahore High Court (LHC) on Tuesday stayed the execution of a ‘paralysed’ convict Abdul Basit.

Basit was scheduled to be hanged on July 29 (today).

Basit, 43, was convicted and sentenced to death in a murder case in 2009. “In 2010, while in prison he contracted tubercular meningitis, which left him paralysed from the waist down,” his counsel Azam Nazir Tarar told an LHC division bench.

He said that Basit was unable to stand and was reliant on a wheelchair. “Despite his disability, his death warrants were issued last week. The execution of a paralysed man will constitute a cruel and unusual punishment, violating the fundamental right to human dignity enshrined in the Constitution,” he said.

The counsel said that Pakistan’s law had provisions for mercy in cases where prisoners were suffering from severe ill-health. “The government’s failure to acknowledge this and commute Basit’s sentence highlights the worrying trend of blanket dismissal of all mercy petitions since executions resumed in 2014,” he said. He requested the court to set aside the death warrants issued for Basit and stop his hanging. The LHC bench, headed by Justice Alia Neelum, halted the execution and sought a reply from the Prisons Department by August 17.

Published in The Express Tribune, July 29^th, 2015.