29 years on death row, Pakistan woman suffers mental illness

Kanizan Bibi was 16 when she was charged with murdering her employer's wife and five children.

The police said she was having an affair with her employer, who was also arrested and later hanged.

Until his execution in 2003, Sher Mohammad swore he and Bibi had never had an affair and had not killed anyone. He maintained his wife and children were killed as payback in a long-running land dispute with his relatives.

Yet Bibi, who was diagnosed with schizophrenia in 2000, remains on death row, where she has been for 29 years.

The Cornell Centre on the Death Penalty Worldwide is spearheading efforts along with the independent Justice Project Pakistan to get Bibi released. But the coronavirus pandemic that has shut down most of Pakistan seems to have also shut down Bibi's chance at freedom.

She's one of more than 600 mentally ill prisoners in Pakistan's overcrowded prisons. A March 30 hearing to present yet another psychiatric evaluation was postponed when courts closed.

Most days Bibi can barely dress herself. She hasn't spoken in more than a decade and her father, before he died in 2016 pleaded in a letter to Pakistan's president to free his only child.

"My daughter was accused of murder, which was a lie," he wrote telling of how she was tortured in police custody.

"They hung her from a fan with ropes thicker than her tiny wrists, beating her small frame with all their might. They let mice loose in her pants, which they tied from the ankles so that they could not escape. Kanizan had been terrified of mice her whole life," he wrote.

"I am a poor man and I beg that the death sentence of my daughter be converted into life in prison."