Plight of mentally ill inmates on death row discussed

KARACHI: Earlier this year many gaped in horror as the Supreme Court ruled that “schizophrenia is not a mental illness” and could be cured. The judgement came after the top court rejected the plea of Imdad Ali, a schizophrenic convicted of murder in 2001.

To discuss this case – because many more are to follow since the state lifted the moratorium on the death penalty last year – a talk titled ‘The Imdad Ali Case and Emergent Conversations vis-à-vis Capital Punishment’ was held at the office of the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan (HRCP) on Thursday.

 Story of Imdad Ali

Sarah Belal, who heads the Justice Project Pakistan and is also handling Ali’s case in court, said Ali had spent almost 14 years on death row since his conviction. But it was revealed in 2012 that he was schizophrenic, and since then his condition has not improved, rather he had to be shifted to a hospital the same year for treatment. Recent reports claimed that he displayed psychotic symptoms and his case was later dubbed as “treatment-resistant”.

Sarah said Ali’s case raised an alarm when, despite efforts from multiple bodies, his final appeal was dismissed by the court a few months ago because the court rejected the fact that schizophrenia is a mental illness. Following an uproar, the court ordered a medical board to investigate so the court could ascertain if it would be inappropriate to hang Ali.

She pointed out that previous findings of Ali’s case could not be found, but the prosecutor general was able to trace it from Multan, proving that he was indeed ill.

“Despite all this, we need to realise that these are not isolated cases, rather there are many prisoners on death row who have shown similar symptoms, yet no one is paying attention to them. In many cases the prison authorities prefer sending such inmates to solitary confinement instead of institutions that would help them recover.”

She lamented that many times the mental condition of the convict is not stated during the trial, but that does not take away the right to clarify it later, which is seldom the case in Pakistan because it is used to build a strong case against the defendant. “Schizophrenia’s symptoms appear ... after a person turns 20 or 30, but it is also to be noted that all inmates are not lucky enough to be diagnosed when they end up in jail. Just last year, Muneer Hussain was hanged even though he was mentally unstable.”

Shumaila Khan, a correspondent for BBC Urdu, who worked on Ali’s case, said the convict’s wife was quite determined to fight his case and had mentioned that he was unwell since the beginning. “She said he would often be disillusioned and think of himself as some sort of a king who had a huge army. While she doesn’t want him to be released owing to his crime, she doesn’t want him to be hanged either.”

On the other hand, Pakistan Association for Mental Health President Dr Haroon Ahmed felt that lawyers were unaware if a person was fit for trial or even stable enough to testify. 

The numbers game

On the number of inmates with psychological disorders, Sarah said a separate log for such people did not exist but there was a hand-written register that could help collect the information. “All of the prisoners are not examined so one can’t be sure of their number, but the state should play its role in making the data accessible for organisations interested in helping out.”

Representing the Legal Aid Office, Barrister Haya Eeman Zahid said the main checkpoints of the criminal justice system needed to evolve to facilitate people who come across it. “Our prisons have become dumping grounds for the mentally ill, and it appears that we haven’t done away with the approach of colonial times when IG Prison was supposed to look after a mental institution.”

She said 80,000 prisoners were being kept in the 96 prisons in Sindh, and at least 6,000 inmates were kept in the central prison, which could house only 3,000. “The prisoners are visited by a team of doctors every week, and out of 12 there is just one psychiatrist ... of 6,000 only 14 [inmates] are mentally ill, which is not quite believable because a person is two to four times more likely to develop such conditions in prison.”

 Is rehabilitation possible?

Referring to the Sindh Mental Health Act 2013, Haya said a mental health authority and a visiting board were yet to be constituted. “We need to ensure that once such people are out, they are able to be rehabilitated in society ... We still need to ask ourselves whether we are willing to let them in or not.”

Regarding the lifting of moratorium on the death penalty, veteran journalist Dr IA Rehman, who also heads the HRCP, said the state needed to be reminded that the act was irreversible. “Just recently, a case surfaced when two brothers were acquitted [of] murder charges when they had been hanged in 2015. We need to be cautious and ask the right questions, especially pertaining to mental health of inmates, because do such people even qualify to stand a fair trial?”

— Originally published in The News