IN the latest picture available of him, Abdul Basit lies on a hospital bed, his beard overgrown, and a small chalkboard on his chest seems to be the only way he can communicate. Once an administrator in a medical college, Basit is a paraplegic. He is also on death row, set to be executed for a murder he committed decades ago.

As the number of executions carried out in Pakistan mount, his case questions the boundaries of mercy, care and consideration: can and should a paralysed person be executed? And who is responsible for a condition contracted while serving a prison sentence? Abdul Basit has been almost executed twice already, staring up at the gallows while confined in a wheelchair before last-minute stays came through.

The details of Abdul Basit’s story expose just how vexing questions of justice and mercy can be, beyond the pronouncements of guilt and innocence. In medical terms, a paraplegic is someone who has lost control of the use of their lower extremities owing either to illness or injury

The details of Abdul Basit’s story expose just how vexing questions of justice and mercy can be.

Congenital conditions such as spina bifida can lead to paraplegia, as can spinal cord injuries that sever the connections between it and the muscles and joints it controls. Abdul Basit was not a paraplegic when he was first imprisoned. A picture of him prior to his conviction shows a slender man with a bushy moustache staring at the camera; he wears a button-down shirt and slacks.

In February 2010, over 18 months after having become an inmate at Central Jail, Faisalabad, Abdul Basit came down with a fever that was left untreated for so long that he fell into a coma. Owing to riots breaking out in prison a few months earlier, Abdul Basit had been put in solitary confinement. According to the Justice Project, an NGO that is working on the case, the hygiene conditions in solitary confinement were particularly bad and, perhaps as a consequence of this, he contracted tuberculosis.

In August 2010, when he was finally taken to the emergency ward of the hospital, he was barely alive. Once there, doctors diagnosed him with cerebral malaria, noting that he was confused and possibly delirious. Five days later, the diagnosis was changed to tubercular meningitis, and it was noted that the patient had “improved” even while the rest of the charts said that he was suffering loss of consciousness, high fever and was suffering fits.

Just a day later, Basit’s condition deteriorated even further and signs of nerve palsy were noted; the prison doctors said that it was not possible to treat him in prison, but this apparently did not lead to any action. Basit received treatment with steroids and anti-tuberculosis drugs. He was discharged back into prison even though his charts reported that he had a bowel obstruction and severe rigidity in his lower extremities.

Back in prison in December 2010, Basit also developed jaundice. The drugs and psychological toll of the disease meant that his 32-year old body had become emaciated; he weighed only 40 kg. Another six months passed with similar incidences of neglect and apathy by the jail authorities, and in July 2011 Basit, now also unable to urinate, ended up back in DHQ Hospital for emergency surgery.

A series of supposed treatments followed, but in December 2011 a medical board noted that he was now permanently paralysed and disabled and would likely never recover the use of his lower extremities. They also noted that it would be difficult to manage care for Basit in prison. Regardless of this, he was returned to prison where his condition deteriorated further. In November 2012, neurosurgeons examining him said that he was at risk for developing even more problems if he remained in the unsanitary environment of the prison. Despite this, a legal ruling in 2013 said that he would have to remain there. Abdul Basit remains in Central Jail, Faisalabad today.

He was tried and convicted for murder and sentenced to death. In the process of carrying out the sentence, however, he has become subject to a level of cruel and unusual (if unintended) punishment that goes beyond what was meted out to him. It is clear from medical records that the conditions in prison and the apathy of prison officials that did not respond to his condition caused him to become a paraplegic. Further, the lack of treatment and neglect has been torture, leaving him in a state where he cannot protect himself from other inmates or even ask for better treatment before prison officials.

In order to reach the requirements of fairness, justice cannot and must not be vengeance. The latter is not the business of state institutions, whose primary purpose is to ensure that those who disobey the law are removed from society. So it was with Abdul Basit when he was imprisoned. In imposing punishment, the state acts as an agent of society, acting in its best interests. It is in this latter portion that the issue becomes problematic, for society and its welfare cannot be ensured by simply imposing punishment; they also require considering the tempering effects of mercy.

In Abdul Basit’s case, the young man who committed a murder is no more. Abdul Basit’s paralysed condition ensures that he is no longer a threat to society and his limited abilities do not pose a danger to anyone. Furthermore, the fact that his condition is the product of his imprisonment requires that his death sentence be re-evaluated in light of the neglect that has already, if unintentionally, imposed plenty of punishment on him.

The humanity of a society is preserved not simply by imprisoning those who kill and steal and injure, the lawless and the criminal; it is also maintained by recognising that justice must be tempered with mercy. It is this latter consideration that is urgently required in Abdul Basit’s case, so that a paraplegic, sick and destitute, is not put to death.

The writer is an attorney teaching constitutional law and political philosophy.

rafia.zakaria@gmail.com

Published in Dawn, March 9th, 2016