West Bengal: Death-row prisoner arguing own case studied law in jail

KOLKATA: One of Bengal’s death-row prisoners, who has been allowed to argue his own case in the Calcutta High Court, is not even a lawyer. He said he had studied law in prison.
On Tuesday, he was produced in the HC that allowed him to hear the legal pleadings online and asked him to appear in court and plead his case.
Sheikh Abdul Nayeem (42), an alleged Lashkar-e-Taiba terrorist, who is now on death row for waging war against the state, has been allowed to argue his death penalty by the same court earlier this month and he has been shifted from Tihar to Presidency Jail in Kolkata.
On Tuesday, the Aurangabad resident, who was clad in formal check shirt, a pair of trousers and shoes with a branded wrist watch and two fountain pens in his shirt pocket, pleaded before justice Joymalya Bagchi and justice Bivas Pattanayak in fluent English to inspect the exhibits submitted before the case before initiating his submissions.
The court allowed the same and scheduled the next hearing of the case on Thursday when Nayeem will access the proceedings through video conferencing from the correctional home. “Only on those days Sk. Abdul Nayeem advances oral arguments and he shall be produced physically before this court under proper security arrangements,” the order reads.