A dramatic midnight intervention by the Supreme Court saved from the gallows a man convicted of beheading five of his daughters in June 2010.
The Supreme Court bench, comprising CJI P Sathasivam and Justice Ranjana Desai, stayed the execution of Maganlal’s death sentence late on Wednesday, hours before he was to be marched to the gallows at a Jabalpur jail.
Maganlal was snatched out of the jaws of death when his counsel approached the CJI with the plea that his family was not informed about the rejection of the mercy plea by the President on July 22, 2013.
As the apex court had stayed execution in eight similar instances in the past, counsel for Maganlal approached the court late on Wednesday forcing the Registry and personal staff of the office of CJI to work till late after midnight.
As the execution was barely hours away, the Registry went into a fast-forward mode and contacted Madhya Pradesh’s counsel Colin Gonsalves. The order had to be communicated to the State Government and the obvious choice was Chief Secretary’s office.
The Registry is understood to have prepared a fax to be sent to the CS office, but then it realised it may be too late by the time the top bureaucrat received the fax on opening of his office at 10.30 am the next day. The Registry then contacted the DG (Prisons) at Jabalpur jail on phone and communicated the stay order, which was also faxed.
After staying eight executions in the past in the similar manner, the apex court made it clear that it was not happy with the turn of events.“Now slowly, we are creating one more jurisdiction,” the Bench said, citing several rounds of litigation at various levels — trial court, High Court, Supreme Court, rejection of Presidential pardon and now stay of execution.
Gonsalves pointed out that the procedure at the last leg of execution of death sentence also had to be fair and reasonable. In the above cases, there was no procedure to intimate the family members about the rejection of mercy petitions. In the case of Parliament attack convict Mohammad Afzal, he was executed long before his family got intimation by post about the President’s decision to reject his mercy petition. “Adequate time should be given for the family to be with the convict,” he added.
The family of Maganlal too was oblivious of the “black warrant” issued by the Sehore district and sessions court in Madhya Pradesh.
Maganlal had hacked to death five daughters aged between 1 and 6 years on June 11, 2010 and later attempted suicide. The trial court decision came in February 2011 and confirmation of death sentence by the High Court followed within seven months. The apex court had rejected his petition on January 9, 2012.