India's Supreme Court commuted the death sentence of...

India's Supreme Court commuted the death sentence of Ram Pal, a man convicted of murdering 21 people including women and children, to life imprisonment as the murders he committed 17 years ago appeared to have been an act of extreme provocation. Pal was a member of a gang who fired at their victims and then set their houses on fire after locking the doors from the outside in the northern Indian state of Uttar Pradesh in 1986. The judges said Pal reacted in the "brutal manner" after his own relatives were killed by his victims. "It is true the incident in question has prematurely terminated the life of 21 people, but then the number of deaths cannot be the sole criterion for awarding the maximum punishment of death," Hedge said. "While in a given case, the death penalty may be the appropriate sentence even for a single murder, it would not necessarily mean that in every case of multiple murders the death penalty has to be the normal punishment," he said.