Playing with life
The Supreme Court commuting to life imprisonment the sentence of 15 people on the death row for inordinate delay in granting them pardon or executing them, is a severe indictment of our favourite political strategy of avoiding action and hoping the problem will go away. This ruling by the highest seat of our judiciary is also a rap on the knuckles of the executive which has all too often tried to dodge politically inconvenient decisions and wait for the courts to force its hands before doing what it should have in the first place. Tuesday’s ruling by a three-member constitutional bench headed by the Chief Justice Mr P Sathasivam, appeared to signal that the Judiciary is tired of covering up for executive or legislative indecisiveness, since the Supreme Court started the week by throwing the emotive issue of decriminalising homosexuality back to the government for curative legislation if the Parliament saw it fit to do so.
The instant ruling that “unexplained delay is ground for commuting death penalty to life sentence,” came on a plea by 15 condemned convicts—including three gang members of forest brigand Veerappan who killed several policemen and villagers and a Haryana couple who killed 13 relatives—that there has been no response to their mercy petitions to the President of India. The ruling, which also allowed no discrimination for terrorists on death row over clemency, was expected to affect Devinder Pal Singh Bhullar, who was convicted for a New Delhi car bombing that killed nine people in 1993, and Rajiv Gandhi’s assassins Murugan, Arivu and Santhan whose mercy plea has been pending for nearly 12 years. The court on Thursday stayed Bhullar’s execution and ordered a medical report on his mental condition—over which he had sought clemency. As for the Rajiv Gandhi killers, the government counsel has raised objection to leniency and a hearing is due next Tuesday.
Our courts appear less inclined towards capital punishment after an amendment to the law in 1973 mandated judges to give special reasons for a death sentence and the Supreme Court laid down the “rarest of rare” doctrine in 1980. While on Tuesday the SC overruled execution over executive delay, the same court last year commuted a death sentence on the same ground but rejected a similar plea within weeks. Such inconsistency has also been seen in the disposal of mercy petitions, since the President and state governors are guided by the advice of the central and state home ministries. While Mrs Pratibha Patil commuted death sentences of 35 persons before leaving Rashtrapati Bhavan in 2012, Mr Pranab Mukherjee has been very frugal. The SC bench on Tuesday emphasised that the president and governors, were not exercising a prerogative but were discharging their constitutional obligation and that even a convict on the death row has a de facto right (to life) under Article 21 of the Constitution.
Keeping people indefinitely on death row is a manifestation of the vile and irresponsible way our otherwise exemplary criminal justice system is rendered notoriously slow by a combination of political and executive ineptness, interference and corruption. Either the government erases capital punishment from the statute books—for which it can amend the law—or it must expeditiously carry out the judicial verdict which is the culmination of the due process we uphold. Sitting on a judgement and playing deaf, is not showing respect for life. It is playing with the life of the condemned and condemning the lives of those who seek judicial remedy.
Sitting on a judgement and playing deaf, is not showing respect for life. It is playing with the life of the condemned and condemning the lives of those who seek judicial remedy
