On February 18, the 12-year-old son of Shabnam, a death row convict from Uttar Pradesh’s Amroha, appealed to President Ram Nath Kovind to “forgive” his mother. Shabnam has exhausted most of her legal remedies, and if executed, will be the first woman in independent India to be hanged for a crime.

Shabnam along with her lover Saleem was convicted of killing seven members of her family in 2008 –– father Shaukat Ali (55), mother Hashmi (50), elder brother Anees (35), Anees’s wife Anjum (25), younger brother Rashid (22), cousin Rabia (14), and Arsh, Anees’s 10-month-old son.

According to the prosecution case, on the intervening night of April14-15, Shabnam sedated six of her family members –– everyone except the baby Arsh. Saleem then chopped their heads off with an axe, while Shabnam held them by their hair. She throttled her 10-month-old nephew.
When Shabnam and Saleem were arrested five days after the crime, they were both in their 20s, and Shabnam was seven weeks pregnant. In December of that year, she gave birth to her son.

In 2010, an Amroha sessions court sentenced them to death, which was upheld by the Allahabad High Court in 2013 and the Supreme Court in May 2015. Within 10 days, however, the Apex Court stayed the death warrants.
In September 2015, then-Uttar Pradesh Governor Ram Naik rejected Shabnam’s plea for mercy, which she had sought on the ground of her responsibilities towards her son, Mohammad Taj. In August 2016, then President Pranab Mukherjee rejected her mercy petition.
In January 2020, a Supreme Court bench headed by CJI SA Bobde upheld the death sentence.

Shabnam was the one who had raised the alarm about her family’s murder. She had initially claimed that unknown assailants had entered her home and killed everyone. However, during the course of their trial, the couple turned against each other. The 2015 Supreme Court judgment says that in her Section 313 statement, Shabnam said Saleem had entered the house with a knife through the roof and killed all her family members while she was asleep. Saleem, on the other hand, said he reached the house “only on the request of Shabnam” and that when he reached there, she confessed to having killed the others.