The Supreme Court on Wednesday dismissed the petition filed by the central government seeking a review of the decision to commute the death sentences of the three people convicted for conspiring to assassinate Rajiv Gandhi.
In far too many previous cases, capital punishment has been held hostage by judicial caprice and political calculations. With this ruling, the court has reiterated that the process by which the death penalty is administered should be just, bringing a semblance of humanity to an undoubtedly barbarous practice.
The case has been on the boil since 18 February, when the Supreme Court commuted to life imprisonment the death sentences of Sriharan, Suthendraraja and Perarivalan. The three were to be executed for conspiring to assassinate former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi in 1991. Gandhi was killed by a suicide bomber, so only the conspirators, and not the assassin, remained alive to face the consequences. A trial court swiftly sent them to death row. After eight years, the Supreme Court confirmed their sentences.
But for 20 years after that, their clemency petitions did the rounds of the Home Ministry, Law Ministry, and the President and Tamil Nadu Governor’s offices before landing before the Supreme Court once again in 2014. For 11 of those years the petitions were stuck with the President’s office.
When Sriharan, Suthendraraja and Perarivalan were sentenced to death in 1999, the judges presiding over the case had ignored the Bachan Singh judgment of 1980, which stipulated that the circumstances of which the convict committed the crime must enjoy equal weightage with the nature of the crime itself. Instead, the judges in the Rajiv Gandhi case ignored the role of the convicts as conspirators, branded them as assassins of a former prime minister and awarded them death for “bringing Indian democracy to a grinding halt”. Not only could it be construed that the penalty was wrongly awarded, the convicts had to wait an excruciating 20 years to find out if the executions would be carried out.
Hangings snuff out lives, but a scrupulously-followed judicial process makes death less cruel – at least in the eyes of the law. In recent years, however, there have been several glaring aberrations to this process. Most infamous was the ruling to send Mohammad Afzal Guru to the gallows in 2005 for the sake of satisfying the “collective conscience of society”, despite the court itself accepting that Afzal was only a conspirator and not a perpetrator in the Parliament attack of 2001, and that the evidence against him wasn’t concrete enough to warrant death. Afzal Guru was hanged in February 2013.
Then, in April 2013, the Supreme Court upheld the death sentence of Devinder Pal Singh Bhullar, for the 1993 Delhi blasts, again in violation of precedent. Worse, it heaped scorn on human rights principles by stating that terrorists were entitled to a lesser degree of justice than even the most hardened criminals. The trial court had sentenced Bhullar in 2002. Eleven years on death row, waiting for his mercy plea to be granted, made him mentally ill. His ill-health alone should have been sufficient grounds to commute his sentence to life, but the apex court remained unmoved.
However, the judgment in the Shatrughan Chauhan case in January marked a paradigm shift. The Supreme Court was deciding the fate of 15 death row inmates, some of whom had gone insane on account of the prolonged wait. It held that the indefinite delay in deciding clemency petitions is dehumanising, a gross violation of the right to life and grounds for commuting the death sentence to one of life imprisonment. This is because a torturous wait, with the attendant uncertainty, is cruel and unjust.
Moreover, even though the Constitution vested the prerogative of clemency solely in the President and Governor of a State, this prerogative was not to be taken as a carte blanche, the court said. Granting pardon was not merely an individual act of mercy, but one of considerable constitutional significance and so requires accountability to the judiciary. The sentences of all the 15 men, including Bhullar’s, were commuted to life imprisonment.
Infused with fresh hope, Sriharan and his co-conspirators approached the Supreme Court, citing the Shatrughan Chauhan case, and pleading for similar treatment. The central government vehemently opposed their plea. The Attorney General even went so far as to snigger that 20 years incarceration on death row was actually salubrious, since the trio were “singing and not swinging between life and death.” They were studying and organising music shows during the pendency of their mercy pleas, he said, so it could not be said they were agonised.
Disregarding this, the court continued its progressive march from Shatrughan Chauhan and held that “Exorbitant delay in disposal of mercy petitions renders the process of execution of death sentence arbitrary, whimsical and capricious and, therefore, inexecutable. Furthermore, such imprisonment, occasioned by inordinate delay in disposal of mercy petitions, is beyond the sentence accorded by the law and to that extent is extra-legal and excessive.”
Having said that, the Court left it to the appropriate government to decide on the trio’s future prospects of liberty. It is here that populist politics crept in. Invoking the State government’s powers under Section 435 of the Code of Criminal Procedure, which allows remission of sentences on humanitarian considerations, Jayalalithaa announced her intention to free the three convicts in three days. By playing to the sentiments of Tamil nationalism, she hoped to steal a march over her rivals.
The Congress, on the other hand, was loath to squander the opportunity to avenge Rajiv Gandhi’s assassination, and to prove to the Bharatiya Janata Party that it had a zero-tolerance towards terrorism. It claimed that since the trio was convicted under several central legislations such as the Arms Act, the Explosives Act and the Foreigners Act, it had the sole prerogative to decide the matter.
So bent was the Congress upon reaping a bountiful political harvest that the central government, in a review petition, challenged the very legality of the Shatrughan Chauhan judgment. It wanted to wrest control of administering capital punishment from the judiciary. As if atoning for its decision in Afzal’s case, the court dismissed the review petition with a terse sentence: “We find it devoid of any merit.”
This judgment puts India's penological system on the path to having a proper debate on capital punishment without being held hostage by politics.
In far too many previous cases, capital punishment has been held hostage by judicial caprice and political calculations. With this ruling, the court has reiterated that the process by which the death penalty is administered should be just, bringing a semblance of humanity to an undoubtedly barbarous practice.
The case has been on the boil since 18 February, when the Supreme Court commuted to life imprisonment the death sentences of Sriharan, Suthendraraja and Perarivalan. The three were to be executed for conspiring to assassinate former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi in 1991. Gandhi was killed by a suicide bomber, so only the conspirators, and not the assassin, remained alive to face the consequences. A trial court swiftly sent them to death row. After eight years, the Supreme Court confirmed their sentences.
But for 20 years after that, their clemency petitions did the rounds of the Home Ministry, Law Ministry, and the President and Tamil Nadu Governor’s offices before landing before the Supreme Court once again in 2014. For 11 of those years the petitions were stuck with the President’s office.
When Sriharan, Suthendraraja and Perarivalan were sentenced to death in 1999, the judges presiding over the case had ignored the Bachan Singh judgment of 1980, which stipulated that the circumstances of which the convict committed the crime must enjoy equal weightage with the nature of the crime itself. Instead, the judges in the Rajiv Gandhi case ignored the role of the convicts as conspirators, branded them as assassins of a former prime minister and awarded them death for “bringing Indian democracy to a grinding halt”. Not only could it be construed that the penalty was wrongly awarded, the convicts had to wait an excruciating 20 years to find out if the executions would be carried out.
Hangings snuff out lives, but a scrupulously-followed judicial process makes death less cruel – at least in the eyes of the law. In recent years, however, there have been several glaring aberrations to this process. Most infamous was the ruling to send Mohammad Afzal Guru to the gallows in 2005 for the sake of satisfying the “collective conscience of society”, despite the court itself accepting that Afzal was only a conspirator and not a perpetrator in the Parliament attack of 2001, and that the evidence against him wasn’t concrete enough to warrant death. Afzal Guru was hanged in February 2013.
Then, in April 2013, the Supreme Court upheld the death sentence of Devinder Pal Singh Bhullar, for the 1993 Delhi blasts, again in violation of precedent. Worse, it heaped scorn on human rights principles by stating that terrorists were entitled to a lesser degree of justice than even the most hardened criminals. The trial court had sentenced Bhullar in 2002. Eleven years on death row, waiting for his mercy plea to be granted, made him mentally ill. His ill-health alone should have been sufficient grounds to commute his sentence to life, but the apex court remained unmoved.
However, the judgment in the Shatrughan Chauhan case in January marked a paradigm shift. The Supreme Court was deciding the fate of 15 death row inmates, some of whom had gone insane on account of the prolonged wait. It held that the indefinite delay in deciding clemency petitions is dehumanising, a gross violation of the right to life and grounds for commuting the death sentence to one of life imprisonment. This is because a torturous wait, with the attendant uncertainty, is cruel and unjust.
Moreover, even though the Constitution vested the prerogative of clemency solely in the President and Governor of a State, this prerogative was not to be taken as a carte blanche, the court said. Granting pardon was not merely an individual act of mercy, but one of considerable constitutional significance and so requires accountability to the judiciary. The sentences of all the 15 men, including Bhullar’s, were commuted to life imprisonment.
Infused with fresh hope, Sriharan and his co-conspirators approached the Supreme Court, citing the Shatrughan Chauhan case, and pleading for similar treatment. The central government vehemently opposed their plea. The Attorney General even went so far as to snigger that 20 years incarceration on death row was actually salubrious, since the trio were “singing and not swinging between life and death.” They were studying and organising music shows during the pendency of their mercy pleas, he said, so it could not be said they were agonised.
Disregarding this, the court continued its progressive march from Shatrughan Chauhan and held that “Exorbitant delay in disposal of mercy petitions renders the process of execution of death sentence arbitrary, whimsical and capricious and, therefore, inexecutable. Furthermore, such imprisonment, occasioned by inordinate delay in disposal of mercy petitions, is beyond the sentence accorded by the law and to that extent is extra-legal and excessive.”
Having said that, the Court left it to the appropriate government to decide on the trio’s future prospects of liberty. It is here that populist politics crept in. Invoking the State government’s powers under Section 435 of the Code of Criminal Procedure, which allows remission of sentences on humanitarian considerations, Jayalalithaa announced her intention to free the three convicts in three days. By playing to the sentiments of Tamil nationalism, she hoped to steal a march over her rivals.
The Congress, on the other hand, was loath to squander the opportunity to avenge Rajiv Gandhi’s assassination, and to prove to the Bharatiya Janata Party that it had a zero-tolerance towards terrorism. It claimed that since the trio was convicted under several central legislations such as the Arms Act, the Explosives Act and the Foreigners Act, it had the sole prerogative to decide the matter.
So bent was the Congress upon reaping a bountiful political harvest that the central government, in a review petition, challenged the very legality of the Shatrughan Chauhan judgment. It wanted to wrest control of administering capital punishment from the judiciary. As if atoning for its decision in Afzal’s case, the court dismissed the review petition with a terse sentence: “We find it devoid of any merit.”
This judgment puts India's penological system on the path to having a proper debate on capital punishment without being held hostage by politics.
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