Dhananjoy?s mercy plea was a mess: Peter Bleach

Bleach of the Purulia armsdrop case was with Dhananjoy at a Kolkata jail. Writing for the HT from UK, he remembers the rape convict.

Peter Bleach of the Purulia armsdrop case was with Dhananjoy Chatterjee at a Kolkata jail before he was released earlier this year. Writing for the Hindustan Times from Scarborough, UK, Bleach remembers Dhananjoy...

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I knew Dhananjoy Chatterjee personally. We were imprisoned in adjacent blocks at the Alipore Central Correctional Home. I wrote some of the petitions that were heard in the high court a little while ago.

He is not a goonda or a mafia boss. He is polite, quiet and poor. Not for him designer clothes, flashy sunglasses or gold watches. He has none of the trappings of the jail mafia. He is also illiterate, at least in English. He also doesn't understand the judicial system.

When the government started making plans to hang him, somebody gave me his case papers to see if anything could be done. At face value, his case papers seemed to be in order. But his appeal for mercy, written and submitted years before, seemed to me to be a ridiculous document. It made no sense.

Through an interpreter I asked him what he had said in his petition. He told me he didn't know what he had said — another prisoner who worked for the jail welfare department had written it. It was a disgrace and it is no wonder it was rejected.

When I read the trial record, it was obvious Dhananjoy had been convicted on the basis of the most indecisive circumstantial evidence imaginable. There were serious defects in the evidence of certain witnesses. On that basis alone, a conviction, let alone a death sentence, could be safely ruled out.

But apart from the defects in the trial evidence, the Supreme Court has specifically directed that when there is undue delay in the execution of a death sentence, that sentence must be commuted to life imprisonment.

I wrote a petition for Dhananjoy on that basis. And I was absolutely right. That is amply proven by the extraordinary fact that the prosecutor's primary submission was that the delay in execution was Dhananjoy Chatterjee's own fault!

Even more extraordinary, the court accepted that submission. No one bothered to explain how an illiterate man incarcerated in a jail and with no personal access to the courts could possibly be held to blame for the delay in his own execution.

Let's not make any mistake about what is happening here. Dhananjoy is going to be hanged because he is a poor man without any influence. Do we really think he would be hanged if he was a wealthy, upper caste man, a politician, a filmstar or a gang boss with political connections? Of course not. Ways are always found to acquit such people.