LAHORE, Pakistan: Pakistan’s Supreme Court commuted on Wednesday death sentences for two mentally ill people and sent them to health facilities and it directed the government to seek a pardon for a third mentally ill person on death row.
The ruling reverses a 2016 decision in which the court sentenced to death a man, Imdad Ali, suffering from schizophrenia. That sentence was never carried out and Ali was one of the two who had their sentence commuted.
Human rights groups welcomed the ruling.
“This is a historic judgment that validates our decade-long struggle to get the courts to recognise mental illness as a mitigating circumstance,” Sarah Belal, founder and executive director of Justice Project Pakistan, told Reuters.
Some 518 people have been executed in Pakistan since 2014 when the government lifted a moratorium on capital punishment, and 4,225 people are on death row.
Ali was sentenced to death for murder in 2001 and government doctors later diagnosed him with paranoid…