AFTAB BAHADUR Age at time of conviction: 15 Years on death row: 23 Status: Executed on 10 June 2015 A victim of tainted evidence obtained through torture and witness intimidation In 1992, Aftab Bahadur, a 15-year-old plumber’s apprentice, and his co-worker Ghulam Mustafa were arrested and charged with the murder of a woman and her two sons. The deceased were the wife and children of a local businessman, who hailed from an influential family. The case was tried under the now defunct and much maligned Speedy Trials Act of 1991, under which the police was required to submit the results of their investigation within 14 days to the Special Court, which in turn, had a maximum of a month to conclude the trial. This gave the defendants little time to prepare their case while simultaneously encouraging the police to falsify evidence and pin the blame on a vulnerable defendant. Aftab, a poor teenager from a minority Christian community, proved to be that easy target. Aftab was arrested on the basis of the eye-witness testimony of Fateh Muhammad, an elderly servant at the household who was allegedly found unconscious in a park near the house on the night of the murders. The Speedy Court relied extensively on Fateh’s testimony to convict and sentence Aftab to death. However, later on Fateh came clean and retracted his statement to Aftab’s lawyers. He professed that he was tortured by the police and coerced by his employer to place Aftab and Ghulam at the scene, while in truth Fateh had not witnessed the crime. Aftab’s co-accused Ghulam was also tortured into implicating Aftab, but he too later on retracted his statement. Furthermore, Aftab’s fingerprints were claimed to have been found at the scene of the crime but, during the trial, Aftab recounted how the police took him to the scene of the crime and brutalized him until he put his oil-doused hand on a cupboard. According to Aftab’s government issued documents, his date of birth was in 1977. But despite being 15 years old at the time, the police recorded his age as 21. Aftab and his counsel did not realize age to be a mitigating factor and failed to raise this issue during the proceedings. Aftab spent the next 23 years, his entire adulthood, behind bars in a state of being “between life and death.” By all accounts he was a model prisoner and a painter who honed his artistry in jail. Despite his extremely strong case for innocence and juvenility which involved the only witnesses retracting their statements, Aftab was executed in 2015 after his mercy petition was rejected.