INDIA: AWARDING DEATH PENALTY TO BE MADE TOUGHER: SC

the Supreme Court said judges, while awarding death penalty in mechanical consonance with the 1980 ‘Bachan Singh’ judgment, appear to have lost sight of vital ingredients – “the lesser alternative (life imprisonment) is unquestionably foreclosed” and “objective fairness standards”. These two ingredients must essentially be fulfiled by judges before awarding death penalty, but have not been complied with diligently in the recent past, said a Bench of Justices S B Sinha and M K Sharma. Concerned by the varying interpretation of the “rarest of rare case” guidelines laid down in Bachan Singh judgment, the apex court said time had come for an attempt towards deciphering a common view on this to usher in “some objectivity to the precedent on death penalty which is crumbling down under the weight of disparate interpretations”.
The judgment came in a case in which the apex court awarded life sentence to four members of a gang responsible for killing three “Shiv Sena” workers in Mumbai in March 1999 but rejected Mahrashtra government's appeal for death sentence to three of them.
It took note of the concern of legal commentators that while the rich and powerful never got the extreme penalty, “it is invariably the marginalised and destitute who suffer extreme penalty ultimately”.