Indian Justice : 11 convicted murderers freed

Dr Who SG

From : http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/4561281.stm

An Indian court has commuted a death sentence handed down to a man convicted of murdering an Australian missionary and his two young sons.

The man, Dara Singh, has now been sentenced to life imprisonment.

The court also released 11 out of 12 others who had received life sentences for the killings.

Graham Staines and his two sons - Philip, who was 10, and Timothy, eight - were burned alive in 1999 in a remote village in eastern India.

'Individual act'

The killings were widely condemned in India and across the world.

After a lengthy trial, 13 people were convicted of their murder in September 2003.

But in a ruling on Thursday, the court said there was no evidence to suggest that it was the individual act of Dara Singh which was responsible for the death of Mr Staines and his sons.

The court said that the charges against 11 out of 12 other people who were found guilty with Mr Singh have not been proven beyond doubt, and ordered their release.

Mr Staines had spent 30 years working with leprosy patients in Orissa.

robertteh SG

Communism has collapsed. Anti-communism laws and regulations like the ISD still stubbornly remain. For whose purpose?

The world has become one global village linked by the internet where people interact with one another beyond politics and governments. Does our government leaders understand this global change and still want to keep news and truths to themselves by continuing their past out-dated press and media controls and licensing?

Death sentences and strict people-control policies have been practised over the past 39 years to attain political controls in the name of stability. We are seeing the same policies and parochial thinking to put our small island under the political controls being practised to no end.

If there is no change, we are going to see people's eating of chewing gums banned in the name of cleanliness. We are going to see reading of truthful news etc etc kept under control by hard-hearted leaders for political purposes no longer know about moral, social or people considerations as seen in the casino debates.

The latest is : 1 in 3 families who are facing financial problems have their electricity cut off and some fires have started due to charcoal cooking in our flats.

Why the government after 39 years still cannot change their control freakiness? Death penalty is part of the same control thinking based on outdated idea that government must punish severely all wrong doers to teach every one who is potentially regarded as likely to commit crimes or murder.

It is all a matter of perception. Perception has become a problem with control freaks. This is where people must take control and think more independently of the mainstream policies created by control freaks. Not all human beings are potential criminals. Many just want to live a more useful conscientious and fulfilling lives. Do we want to let them? How do we want to punish citizens for offences or crimes should be a more balanced decision of citizens and state as a whole not by the paranoid of control freaks. Trying to tax and recover all costs and squeezing every cent even if government has collected all the surplus monies over the immediate needs is yet another decision to be properly made by all citizens at the end. This is where citizens' views and maturity count. Without maturity and candour on the part of citizens, nothing can change and control freaks will be always having their ways.