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Saturday, Dec 08, 2007
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Tamil Nadu
The subject of capital punishment is a very contentious issue worldwide, says Mohamed Imranullah S.
The Madras High Court Bench on January 12 this year commuted to life imprisonment the death sentence imposed on a person convicted for committing sodomy and murdering a four-year-old boy in Srivilliputtur. “The offence committed by the accused is macabre, gruesome, dastardly, horrible, abnormal, unnatural, blood curdling, hair raising and unduly obnoxious. Yet, this cannot be treated as the ‘rarest of rare offences’ warranting death se ntence,” the court said. On May 2, in a similar case, the High Court commuted the death sentence imposed on a 62-year-old man convicted of raping and murdering a four-year-old girl at Kodaikanal. The court said that the convict was a narcotic, drunkard, illiterate and uncivilised. Though he did not intend to kill the child, she died owing to profuse bleeding following the assault. Such offences committed due to a momentary weakness on seeing a lonely girl at a secluded place did not fall under the ambit of “rarest of rare offences,” the court held. The High Court on Thursday confirmed the death sentence awarded to three persons in the Dharmapuri bus burning case. It said: “Undue sympathy to impose inadequate sentence would do more harm to the justice system and undermine public confidence in the efficacy of law…This court is alive not only to the right of the criminal to be awarded just and fair punishment by administering justice tempered with such mercy as the criminal may justly deserve, but also to the rights of the victims of the crime to have the assailant properly punished.” The Supreme Court in its latest ruling in Union of India Vs. Devendra Nath Rai (2006) held that death sentence should be awarded only in the “rarest of rare offences,” leaving it open to the trial courts as well as the High Courts to exercise their discretion in such cases. However, the subject of capital punishment is a very contentious issue worldwide. The critics of death sentence contend that it amounts to blatant human rights violation and that there is every chance of an innocent being wrongly convicted and executed. On the other hand, its supporters argue that such severe punishment alone will bring down crime rate and create fear for law in antisocial elements. Be that as it may, even assuming that the defenders of capital punishment are right, the next question that arises in everyone’s mind is: What kinds of crime deserve death sentence? In some countries, heinous crimes such as murder, rape and adultery carry capital punishment whereas in others people convicted for corruption and religious offences too are executed. However, in India the parameters for awarding capital punishment are yet to be constructively defined in the last 60 years of Independence.
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