ISLAMABAD: A mentally ill prisoner on death row got another lease of life when the Supreme Court stayed his execution by accepting a plea seeking review of its Sept 27 judgement of upholding his death sentence.

Safia Bano, wife of 50-year-old patient of paranoid schizophrenia Imdad Ali who was scheduled to be hanged on Nov 2, approached the apex court with a review petition seeking early hearing on it as well as a request for staying the execution.

The latest death warrant for his execution was issued last week while the earlier one on July 26. The president rejected his mercy petition on Nov 17 last year.

Imdad Ali was sentenced to death in 2002 for killing a cleric.

After a preliminary hearing on Monday, a threejudge bench comprising Chief Justice Anwar Zaheer Jamali, Justice Amir Hani Muslim and Justice Sheikh Azmat Saeed issued notices to Advocate General for Punjab Shakilur Rehman and Prosecutor General Syed Ehtesham Qadir, asking them to offer their opinion on the matter at the next hearing in the second week of November.

In her application seeking stay of the execution, Safia Bano had requested the court to hear her review petition by Oct 31 because it would become infructuous as her husband would be hanged on Nov 2.

Earlier while dismissing her appeal against the Aug 23 order of the Lahore High Court`s Multan bench upholding the death sentence awarded to Imdad by a trial court, the Supreme Court had ruled that schizophrenia was `not a permanent mental disorder rather imbalance, increasing or decreasing depending upon the level of stress`.

The apex court observed that in recent years the prognosis of ailments like schizophrenia had been improved with drugs by vigorous psychological and social managements and rehabilitation. `It is therefore a recoverable disease, which in all the cases does not fall within the definition of `mental disorder` as defined in the Mental Health Ordinance 2001, the verdict had said.

The apex court`s judgement drew criticism from civil society and set off a debate whether or not mentally ill patients deserve to be hanged.

In her petition, Safia Bano requested the Supreme Court to review its Sept 27 verdict, especially when it was evident from across the medical jurisprudence that paranoid schizophrenia was classified as a chronic and permanent mental disorder affecting cognitive functions.

The medical records, the petition argued, reflected that Imdad Ali had consistently displayed symptoms of schizophrenia and was not showing signs of improvement and had active psychotic symptoms.