Preparations begin to hang a woman for 1st time post-1947

Preparations begin to hang a woman for 1st time post-1947

Anuja Jaiswal, Ishita Mishra, & Sandeep Rai TNN

Mathura/Dehradun/Meerut: 18.02.2021

The Mathura district jail has started preparations to hang a woman for the first time in independent India.

Shabnam Ali, 38, was convicted of killing seven members of her family — her mother, father, two brothers, sister-in-law, cousin and 10-month-old nephew — by serving them milk laced with sedatives and then slitting their throats.

Shabnam, 25 then with a double MA, wanted to marry Saleem, a class VI dropout, but her family did not want her to. Both were sentenced to death in 2010 by the sessions court in Amroha in UP, where they are from. Over the next11 years, Shabnam went to the Allahabad high court, the Supreme Court, the President and then the Supreme Court (SC) again. In January last year, her review petition was dismissed by the SC. However, she has notexhausted all judicial remedies. Though her lawyer told TOI that they have not been informed about a death warrant being issued in the one year since, at the Mathura district jail, the only one in the country where women can be hanged, preparations are afoot.

“We have not received any death warrant but have started preparing … Last year in February, the executioner, Pawan Jallad, had inspected the hanging house and said that there was a problem with the structure of the gallows. We are fixing that now. We have also just ordered two hanging ropes from Bihar’s Buxar central jail,” Mathura senior jail superintendent Shailendra Maitrey told TOI on Wednesday. Built 150 years ago, the gallows has never been used in independent India. Step-sisters Renuka Shinde and Seema Gavit have been on death row for kidnapping 13 children and killing at least five of them. A woman from Lucknow, Ramshri, had been sentenced to death in1998 but it was commuted to life imprisonment after she gave birth to a child in prison. So, the hanging house, with creaking structures and covered in overgrowth with decades of disuse, would take a while to set in order.

UNUSED FOR DECADES: The 150-year-old gallows was inspected by the executioner Pawan Jallad in February last year. It is being fixed and prepared for use now, jail officials said