Staff Reporter :
The Appellate Division of the Supreme Court on Wednesday dismissed the appeals filed by two Chuadanga men, Abdul Mokim and Golam Rasul Jharu, who were executed in 2017.
The apex court dismissed the appeals saying that those petitions (filed through lawyers) have become ineffective as their jail appeals (filed through jail authorities) were rejected by the court earlier.
The apex court said it will give certain guidelines on this issue in its written order.
A five-member bench of the Appellate Division headed by Chief Justice Syed Mahmud Hossain passed the order after hearing the issues regarding execution of the two and non-disposal of their regular appeals filed through their lawyers.
During hearing, the SC said the lawyers should have applied to the court for analogous hearing of the criminal appeals (filed by the convicts through lawyers) and the jail appeals (filed through the jail authorities), as the jail appeals were included in the cause list.
Attorney General AM Amin Uddin represented the state, while lawyer Ashif Hasan appeared for the executed convicts during hearing on Wednesday.
Mokim and Jharu were executed at Jashore Central Jail on November 16, 2017.
They were hanged after the Appellate Division bench of then chief justice Surendra Kumar Sinha, Justice Syed Mahmud Hossain and Justice Mirza Hussain Haider upheld an HC judgment on November 15, 2016.
In the judgment, the HC handed the death penalty to the two for murdering a former union parishad member of Chuadanga’s Alamdanga, Md Manwar Hossain, on June 28, 1994.
The two convicts appealed against the HC decision, but the highest court of the country rejected their jail appeals, paving the way for the execution.
Their criminal appeals against the death sentence appeared in the cause-list of the Appellate Division for a hearing on November 3, leaving everyone perplexed.
Humayun Kabir, another lawyer for the convicts on that day said they learned only a few days ago that his clients were executed. Their appeals were filed in 2013, it has been eight years since then.
