ISLAMABAD, April 17: With the change of government in the name of democracy and fairness, people languishing in country’s jails also hope their lot would change for the better, especially if the set-up took a firm stand on death penalty.

A senior officer at Adiala Jail told Dawn on condition of anonymity that inmates, especially those on death row, had great expectations from the new government, and they hoped it would take a bold step by amending laws regarding death penalty and improving jail conditions.

The prisoners are pinning their hopes as Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gillani had also gone through a similar ordeal when he was confined to jails on trumpeted charges by the previous government.

“Instead of releasing Indian prisoners (Kashmir Singh) or British citizen (Mirza Tahir Hussain), the government should also give some impression that it also love, take care and ponders over improving condition of its own prisoners languishing in different jails,” he suggested.

According to reports, 62 countries in the world still maintain death penalty in both law and practice while 92 countries have abolished it completely, whereas 10 countries retain it, but only for crimes committed in exceptional circumstances like crimes committed during war.

Though 33 countries maintain laws permitting the use of death penalty for ordinary crimes, they allowed the maximum punishment to fall into disuse for at least a decade.

Pakistan, however, on December 18, 2007, voted against the Resolution on a Moratorium on the Use of the Death Penalty at the UN General Assembly.

In 1970’s during the first government of the PPP under the premiership of late Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, the source recalled, the life sentence was enhanced to 25 years from 14 years with an idea that the capital punishment would be abolished completely in years to come.

However, the Zia regime kept both the sentences of 25-year life sentence and the death penalty intact, he said.

“A death convict starts dying the day he is put in the death cell,” the source deplored, conceding around 50 per cent of the prisoners in different jails of the country were innocent but implicated in different crimes.

Majority of them came to the jails after already spending years in police lock-ups without even being charged mainly due to the nerve shattering and snail’s paced judicial system.

Such prisoners, he said, lived in cramped and overcrowded cells, often faced abuse and had to grease the palms of the jail authorities to secure even those facilities which were their rights.

According to some reports, 5,260 convicts alone in 30 jails of the Punjab live in 812 condemned cells. The death row cells are usually small rooms that measure 9x12 feet, have attached toilets and are cordoned off by high walls. Sometimes as many as 12 inmates have to put into one cell.

These inmates spent almost 22 hours each day on tenterhook inside cramped cell, though they are allowed to stretch their legs an hour twice in the morning as well as in the evening, the source said.

In its report for 2007, the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan (HRCP) had stated that over 7,000 prisoners were on the death row in different jails of the country and the prisons housed 95,016 detainees as against an authorised capacity of 40,825. Across Pakistan, 67 per cent of the prisoners were awaiting trial.