Israeli Supreme Court Rejects Amiram Ben Uliel’s Appeal, Will Serve Life Imprisonment

JERUSALEM (VINnews) — Supreme Court justices Yitzchak Amit, Yosef Elron and Shaul Shochat rejected an appeal submitted by Amiram Ben-Uliel, who was found guilty of murdering the Dawabshe family in the Samarian town of Duma, after he allegedly set fire to their home. In the 2015 fire, the parents, Sa’ad and Riham and their child Ali died.

Ben-Uliel was charged with the murder and sentenced in 2020 to three life imprisonment terms but appealed the sentence, claiming that his confession had been attained by the Shin Bet under extreme duress and was illegal.

Ben-Uliel’s lawyers, Avigdor Feldman and Yehoshua Reznick, claimed that “a society which wishes to protect its members from being tortured by sympathetic or evil investigators must establish via the courts an iron wall between the prisoner and his torturer, so that the torturer will not be able to force a confession, neither after 36 hours or after a week, as long as the tortured person is in his hands and at his mercy.”

The court ruled that Ben-Uliel’s original confession was valid, despite serious discrepancies between the confession and the evidence on scene. Ben-Uliel claimed that he had acted alone and had arrived on foot, but eyewitnesses said that there were two masked men who arrived in a car and tyre prints proved this. Moreover the two graffiti scrawled at the scene did not match Ben-Uliel’s handwriting.

Religious Zionism leader Betzalel Smotrich responded that “the ruling rejecting Ben-Uliel’s appeal will be remembered as one of the low points of the judiciary system. Judge Elron has given the green light to investigators to employ torture and to convict on the basis of confessions extracted through torture, even when they contradict factual evidence. Tell me more about democracy.”

Jewish Force leader Itamar Ben-Gvir responded that “today there is no dispute that Ben-Uliel’s confession was obtained after he underwent torture and this is an appalling injustice. The laws of the state of Israel require the confession to be invalidated but unfortunately the judges ignored this or did not give real credence to the method of investigation. The court ruled that he was tortured but instead of releasing him and taking a logical decision, they sent him to three life terms. A black day for democracy.”