Turkish court orders retrial in decades old leftist organization case

Hurriyet Daily News with wires

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The court said it overruled Thursday a decision handed down by a lower court to sentence 20 defendants to life in prison citing a violation of their right to a defense over the failure to request their final testimony during the trial.

Hearings began two years after the 1980 military coup and many defendants had already spent more than 15 years in detention awaiting trial. Twenty-one defendants will stand trial again, and if convicted, many could be returned to prison.

The case, publicly known as the Dev-Yol main case, started in October 1982, with the trial of members of the illegal socialist Revolutionary Road, or Dev-Yol, organization on numerous charges from murder to a breach of the Constitution.

The arrest of Dev-Yol members began in 1972; however, the indictment in the case was not completed until 1982. The case started with 574 suspects, but reached 723 throughout the process.

The court handed down its first decision in 1989, sentencing seven suspects to death and 39 to life in prison. The Supreme Court of Appeals, however, overruled the decision in 1995 and concluded that heavier penalties should be given to 20 suspects.

In 1996, a retrial began in the local court in which 22 suspects received the death penalty after hearings that lasted almost six years. The sentences were handed down just prior to the elimination of the death penalty in Turkish law.

The Supreme Court of Appeals once again overruled the death penalty ruling citing changes to the law eliminating the practice. It was also revealed that 275 files from the total of 740 case files were missing, one the major arguments of the defendants who alleged that the case was loaded with unlawful acts.

After the second decision taken by the Supreme Court in 2005, the local court commuted the death penalty sentences to life imprisonment for 20 suspects and more than 16 years for a further two. All defendants appealed the decision.