A convict named Shabnam, who axed seven members of her family to death, may become the first woman to be hanged after the independence of India.
The Mathura district jail in western Uttar Pradesh is preparing for the possibility that Shabnam may be ordered to be hanged soon, a senior jail official Akhilesh Kumar said, reports Hindustan Times.
Shabnam and her lover Salim were sentenced to death for sedating seven members of her family and slitting their throats on the night of April 14, 2008. Among the dead was a 10-month-old child. He was strangled.
Shabnam’s family opposed her relationship with Salim due to the disparity in their social and economic status. Shabnam, who was then 24, was a school teacher and Salim a class 6 dropout.
Shabnam and Salim were arrested days after the murders. The couple was sentenced to death by the trial court in 2010; the death sentence was upheld by the Supreme Court in 2015.
Their mercy plea was also rejected by Rashtrapati Bhavan. In January 2020, the Supreme Court also turned down their review petitions, underscoring that Saleem had “meticulously executed the killing after Shabnam administered sleeping pills in tea.”
“The devilry was with the desire to see that no legal heir except Shabnam remains alive. They wanted to grab the property of Shabnam’s parents who were against their marriage,” a bench comprising Chief Justice of India SA Bobde and Justices S Abdul Nazeer and Sanjiv Khanna ruled.
DIG Akhilesh Kumar did not indicate a timeline for execution at Mathura jail but said it might be soon.
The first female hanging house was built in Mathura jail almost 150 years ago, but no woman has been executed there since Independence, reports The Indian Express.
As per the sources, a woman from Lucknow called Ramshri was sentenced to death earlier on April 6, 1998. But her death sentence was commuted into life imprisonment at the last moment after she gave birth to a child inside the jail.
Independent India has sent more than 750 men to the gallows; only eight of them during the last two decades, according to data compiled by the research organization Project 39A of National Law University, Delhi.
Figures compiled by the group indicate there were nearly 404 death row convicts as of December 31, 2020. A 2016 survey had indicated there were only 12 women on the death row but none of them executed yet.
