Duminda gets return-to-jail card while Gota gets flayed for pardon
A daughter’s lone brave battle for justice finally ends in court triumph
Hirunika Premachandra was a mere 23 year old slip of a girl when she learnt that her father, staunch SLFP trade unionist Bharatha Lakshman had been killed in cold blood by the then all powerful Defence Secretary Gotabaya Rajapaksa’s protégé Duminda Silva on the streets of Angoda in broad daylight.
The political killing which seemed to have the blessings of the political establishment, was to transform her hitherto fun loving life and tinge the full promise of youth with a grievous sense of injustice that could not be laid to rest until she had avenged her father’s death to the last full measure.
She became the perennial thorn in Duminda Silva’s flesh which he, even with the help of the whole gamut of his political cronies, could not pull out.
And on Wednesday, a daughter’s relentless battle for justice finally succeeded when three Law Lords of the Supreme Court unanimously held that the pardon former President Gotabaya had granted to Duminda was null and void. They ordered 50-year-old Duminda Silva back behind bars to serve the sentence a five-judge Supreme Court bench had affirmed in 2018 for the murder of Bharatha Lakshman Premachandra.
Justice Preethi Padman Surasena reading out the judgment with Justices Gamini Amarasekara and Arjuna Obeyesekere concurring, held that the decision to pardon Duminda Silva ‘is arbitrary, irrational and has been made for the reasons best known to the former President who appears to have not even made any written decision and has not given any reason thereto’.
In his 61-page judgment, Justice Surasena also accepted the Petitioners’ argument that ‘the instant grant of pardon to Duminda Silva by the former President of the country, has totally eroded the confidence the public has reposed in the criminal justice system of the country’.
But though Hirunika’s quest for justice has been triumphant at the end, the road had been fraught with hazardous pitfalls which would have made a lesser woman resign to her fate. Amidst the threats of political foes and against the advice of well-meaning friends to give up her campaign for justice, this lone brave young woman, with only her mother and younger brother as her family, withstood the threats and continued undaunted.
On that eventful day of September 8, 2016, when High Court Judge Padma Ranawaka read out the majority judgment of the court -- with the presiding judge, Justice Shiran Gunaratne dissenting -- and passed the death sentence on Duminda Silva, she had sat a few yards away from the dock, demurely draped in a white sari and black jacket, pondering her recent past and the bloodsoaked tragedy that had brought her to court to hear the punishment of death decreed for her slain father’s murderer. Had it not been for her, her father’s murder would have suffered the same fate as Thajudeen’s murder; and the killers would still be free.
As the SUNDAY PUNCH of September 11 that year stated: “As television news cameras panned her from every angle, she broke down in a flood of tears as only a daughter grieving her father’s premature loss could. Fighting, without success, to hold back the cascade of tears, sobbing through the rising lumps of emotion in her throat, choking on her words and tripping in her delivery, she cried, she sobbed, she choked but didn’t fail or falter to bare anew the hurt, the pain, the anguish she had borne day in and day out behind closed doors these last five years.
“Yet though her wounded heart bled afresh reliving the trauma, she could not but help, if sporadically, like sudden bursts of spring showers on a parched mound of barren soil, it leapt with subdued joy seeing the black rose of revenge had finally bloomed in her weedy garden bed.”
But her satisfaction in having brought her father’s killers to justice, didn’t last for more than five years. Despite a five-judge Supreme Court bench unanimously affirming the High Court’s sentence of death in 2018, the advent of Gotabaya as President soon gave rise to her disquiet.
He granted a presidential pardon to Duminda Silva on Poson Poya on June 24 2021.
Duminda Silva who had served his life sentence only for three years after the Supreme Court had affirmed the High Court verdict of death, walked away from prison’s death row, a free man. The benefactor of his freedom, the President, Gotabaya Rajapaksa, even rewarded him with a plum job. He was
swiftly made the Chairman of the country’s National Housing Development Authority within a month of his release.
Hirunika’s efforts lay in the dust, reduced to naught. A decision of a five-judge Supreme Court bench had been practically overwritten by arbitrary presidential fiat. The time had come again for Hirunika to unsheathe her sword which had laid unburnished for want of use, and lead the charge of justice against a president who had come to power with a record-breaking mandate not even two years before.
She and her mother both filed petitions at the Supreme Court challenging the Presidential pardon granted to Duminda. Attorney-at-Law Ghazali Hussain, filed a third petition. On May 31, 2022, the Supreme Court granted leave to proceed and issued an interim order suspending Gotabaya’s presidential pardon. Duminda’s brief year of freedom was at an end with the CID ordered to arrest him on sight.
The CID didn’t have to search far. He was found warded in a private room at Sri Jayawardena Hospital, complaining of a head injury suffered in 2011 shooting incident.
He is still there as he had been since May 31 in custody and under prison guard. But there is no sign of him being removed to serve his interrupted life sentence on death row in prison.
Prisons Spokesman Gamini Dissanayake said on January 18 that the Department has requested Duminda Silva to be transferred to the Prisons Hospital. However, a specialist doctor treating Duminda Silva had insisted that he should undergo treatment at that hospital under his specialist care despite the Department's request.
On Saturday, however the force of the Supreme Court order prevailed and Arumadura Lawrence Romello Duminda Silva who had been living in relative comfort, freedom and ease as a paying patient in a Sri Jayawardena Hospital room since May 2022, was transferred to Welikada’s prison hospital to resume his life sentence.
And Hirunika’s victory was made replete.
Justice Preethi Padman Surasena reading out the judgment with Justices Gamini Amarasekara and Arjuna Obeyesekere concurring, held that the decision to pardon Duminda Silva ‘is arbitrary, irrational and has been made for the reasons best known to the former President who appears to have not even made any written decision and has not given any reason thereto’