Cruel and unusual

ARPUTHAM AMMAL, a pensioner with curly silver hair and a wheezing cough, is an abolitionist. Perched in a gloomy warehouse in Chennai, capital of Tamil Nadu, as young men bustle over an exhibition against the death penalty, she explains why. “It is not needed. The ultimate victims of the death sentence are the backward, the minorities and the weak.�She has another reason for her opposition: in a few weeks a hangman is due to slip a noose around her son’s neck. Known as Perarivalan, he was convicted with 25 others of killing Rajiv Gandhi in 1991. Judges ruled that he supplied a battery for the suicide bomber who blew up the former prime minister. Yet for over a decade he has languished in jail awaiting a response to his plea for mercy. In August President Pratibha Patil rejected the plea, and those of two co-conspirators.The three were to be hanged on September 9th. But a local court issued a further stay, ironically to decide if the years of delay, largely in solitary confinement, were a cause for commutation. Delays are universal in India; 16 similar pleas...