The death debate

In questioning the merits of retaining the death penalty, Justice Kurian Joseph has re-ignited a debate that is important and requires serious thought. What he said cannot be ignored, though the law laid down in Bachan Singh (1980), upholding the validity of the death penalty and laying down guidelines for awarding death in ‘the rarest of rare’ cases’, still holds the field. Even the other two judges on the Bench have disagreed with Justice Joseph’s view that the time has come to review the death penalty, its purpose and practice. But it is impossible to ignore the ethical and practical dimensions of the debate in a world that is increasingly questioning the wisdom of capital punishment. Justice Joseph has underscored the arbitrary manner in which it is awarded by different judges and the way public discourse influences such decisions. Concerns over judge-centric variations have been raised in the past. The Supreme Court itself spoke of the “extremely uneven application” of the norms laid down in Bachan Singh . The Law Commission, in its Report in 2015, said the constitutional regulation of capital punishment attempted in that case has failed to prevent death sentences from being “arbitrarily and freakishly imposed”. Justice Joseph seems to endorse the Commission’s assertion that “there exists no principled method to remove such arbitrariness from capital sentencing”.

Source : https://www.thehindu.com/todays-paper/tp-opinion/the-death-debate/article25638763.ece